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35.

Tuesday, April 7, 11:31 P.M.

Darko had arrived at the southern end of the Charleston peninsula twenty minutes earlier. He’d parked the van on South Battery. Wearing a long Burberry coat and carrying a small satchel, he’d met up with Timur, who had been standing vigil beneath a large shade tree on Church Street, across from Vandermeer’s house.

Both expatriate Russians spoke fluent English, as the two had been living in Charleston for five years, like Leonid, and had made an effort to learn the language. Still, when they were together, they much preferred the mother tongue.

“Was the house dark when you got here?” Darko asked Timur while eyeing the structure. He liked that on the side of the house with the veranda there was an empty lot, the remains of what had once been a formal garden. That meant there was a close neighbor on only one side, instead of both.

“Yes,” Timur said. “But I was in the car at that point and couldn’t see all the windows.”

“Has anyone come by?”

“No. She is alone. Initially she moved around a lot, as lights went on and off in various rooms, but for the last hour the only light has been in one window on the second floor.” Timur pointed to be sure Darko could see the light through the heavy drapes.

“Good job,” Darko said. “Sorry it has been a bit of an effort. I’ll take it from here. You can head back.”

“You don’t want me to help?” Timur asked, his voice reflecting his disappointment that his role was over. Darko was a legend among a number of the security and enforcement personnel of Sidereal Pharmaceuticals. Working with him on a job beyond mere surveillance would have afforded Timur bragging rights.

“No need for help,” Darko said. “I want to do this alone. I intend to enjoy myself.”

Timur laughed and nodded. “Got it! And she’s a looker.”

After taking what he needed from the satchel, he left it and the Burberry coat in a safe and convenient location to pick up later. With the proximity of neighbors, since the houses were built close to one another, Darko eschewed the normal explosive entry technique, which he generally favored, but instead used a Halligan bar, a tool he had become acquainted with only after coming to America. It was generally used by US fire departments for gaining access through locked doors. He knew that, handled appropriately, it was nearly silent in comparison to an explosive charge.

Once he breached the front door, Darko knew that timing was of the essence. Moving quietly but quickly, he ascended the main stairway and dashed toward the lighted room. Lynn was sitting at the desk, holding a mobile phone.

Darko reacted by pure reflex. He covered the distance between the hallway and the desk in the blink of an eye, snatching the phone from Lynn’s grasp with his free hand before she had a chance to react to his presence. Carelessly, he tossed it aside to bounce off the carpet and skid across the bare floor into the far corner of the room.

Lynn started a scream of terror, but it barely got out. Darko viciously backhanded her as part of the follow-through of getting rid of the phone. The blow caught her squarely on the side of the face, crushing capillaries in her upper lip and in her nose and sending her sprawling facedown to the floor. The sudden action and noise propelled the cat into a headlong retreat to safer areas of the dark house.

Lynn tried to get up to follow the cat and save herself from this whirlwind assault that had materialized out of the night, but her legs temporarily wouldn’t cooperate. The next thing she knew was being pressed against the floor with a foot in the small of her back. She struggled to free herself to be able to breathe.

“Stay still!” Darko hissed. “Or you will be shot!”

Lynn let her body go limp. The foot eased up the pressure against her.

“Roll over!” Darko commanded.

Lynn did as she was told, looking up at her attacker. The only details she could see were his dark eyes and yellowed teeth. After her initial panic that the attack had caused, she now began to think in a survival mode. Would the neighbors hear if she suddenly screamed bloody murder?

“I will shoot you if you yell,” Darko snarled, as if reading her mind. Then, without warning, he reached down and yanked the cinch around her waist to loosen the knot of the bathrobe. The robe fell partially open, exposing one of her breasts.

With a quick flick of her wrist, Lynn covered herself. At the same time she brought her other hand up to her face and touched her lip, which was swelling and tender. Taking her hand away, she could see that she was bleeding. She knew she was also bleeding from her nose.

As if taunting her, Darko reached down with the gun and used the end of the silencer to re-expose the breast. Lynn didn’t try to re-cover herself. She had the impression the man was smiling behind his mask, possibly leering at her. Was this a rape? Her first thought was that perhaps the man standing over her had somehow heard about Carl’s condition and had come to rob the house and that she was a surprise. Except for Michael, no one knew she was there.

Reining in her terror as much as she could, Lynn had the presence of mind to understand that her survival might depend on cunning. Perhaps she should try to get the man to talk. Maybe she should pretend to cooperate, as it might help. It had registered in her mind that he had an accent, which her panicked mind had yet to identify other than thinking it was familiar.

“Take off your robe!” Darko commanded. He took a step back and lowered the pistol to his side.

Assuming a false smile, Lynn sat up and then re-covered herself. “Why so fast?” she asked. She eyed the gun. Her goal was to get the man to put the gun down. If he did, maybe she could flee. With a little lead, she might be able to get away, as she knew the house intimately and assumed the intruder did not.

“Don’t play with me!” Darko snapped.

“And why not?” Lynn asked with raised eyebrows. She shakily got to her feet and recinched the robe, berating herself for not having gotten dressed after her shower. Her nakedness was a handicap on many levels, magnifying her vulnerability.

Steeling herself against what the man might do, she started toward the door. She moved slowly but deliberately, becoming more stable with each step. Her ear was still ringing from the blow she had taken.

“Stop!” Darko ordered.

“I’m just going to get a cold washcloth for my face,” Lynn explained, making a supreme effort to speak normally. “My lip is bleeding, which isn’t very pleasant for either one of us. Come with me if you’d like!”

When Darko didn’t answer, Lynn continued and stepped out of the study into the dark hallway. Her vague idea was to get him off stride and off balance. As she expected, Darko followed right behind her.

“Where are the lights?” Darko said.

“There’s no need,” Lynn said. “The bathroom is right here.” As Lynn entered, she switched on the sconces on either side of the mirror. Moving to the sink, she regarded her reflection. To project a casualness that she didn’t feel, she purposefully avoided even looking back at Darko. She sensed he had paused at the threshold. With her index finger she carefully examined her split lip. The laceration was mostly on the inside, having been made by one of her own teeth. Her nose had spontaneously stopped bleeding.

“Not as bad as I thought,” Lynn said while running the cold water. “Need to use the facilities?” Lynn couldn’t believe she was asking such a question. Darko didn’t bother to respond, but she had the sense she was confusing him.

With a wash rag soaked in the cold water pressed against her mouth, Lynn pushed past Darko back out into the hall, turning off the light as she did. All the while she maintained a nonchalance she didn’t feel. The man had a feral smell of perspiration and tobacco that she found particularly repulsive. Darko didn’t try to stop her and seemed flustered that she went back into the study. They faced each other in the middle of the room.

“Where would you like to sit?” Lynn asked, as if Darko had come by on a social visit.

With a suddenness that took Lynn’s breath away, Darko grabbed the lapels of her bathrobe and yanked her face within inches of his, practically lifting her off her feet. She now could smell his heated cigarette breath as well as his body odor.

“Enough of this shit,” Darko snapped with uncamouflaged anger. Then with an impressive shove, he propelled her backward onto the couch facing the fireplace. Her head hit hard against the back of the sofa. Had it not, she would have experienced whiplash.

“That’s it!” Darko snarled. “No more games.”

“Whatever you say,” Lynn said, cowering. She’d been shocked at how strong the man was, strong and vicious. Her nascent confidence of somehow controlling the situation and possibly being able to flee vanished in a new sense of helpless terror.

“Now, listen, bitch!” Darko snapped. He was still holding the gun and was now using it to gesture in the air in a way that Lynn found particularly unnerving, since she could see that his finger was on the trigger. He leaned forward, crowding her space. Again she could smell and feel his hot, fetid cigarette breath.

In a vain attempt to protect herself, Lynn pushed back into the couch and pulled the bathrobe tighter. Then she wrapped her arms around her torso, hugging herself.

“You and your friend have pissed off a lot of people in high places,” Darko snarled. “It has to stop, completely stop, otherwise we will kill both of you.”

There was a pause, although Darko did not lean back. He remained with his masked face inches from hers. He continued to stare at Lynn with his dark eyes as if daring her to either contradict him or move and give him a reason to shoot her on the spot. Lynn held her breath. She was frozen in place.

“You understand what I am saying?” Darko questioned with somewhat less intensity. Then, after a short pause, he added with renewed venom, “Talk to me!” He slapped her again, causing her ears to ring all over.

Lynn righted herself and nodded but couldn’t speak. She couldn’t take her eyes off the man’s yellow teeth, which were bunched together at all angles in his lower jaw. She was terrified he would hit her again, maybe even pistol-whip her with the gun he was still brandishing.

“Not so cocky now,” Darko snarled. “Talk or I’ll shoot you!” He leaned back and slowly raised the gun to the point where Lynn could look directly into the barrel at the tip of the silencer.

“What do you want me to say?” Lynn squeaked.

“I want you to tell me you understand.”

“Yes,” Lynn managed. “I understand.”

“What are you doing in this house?”

“Mr. Vandermeer and I were friends,” Lynn said in a shaky voice. “He gave me a key. Some of my things are here.”

At that moment Pep reappeared, causing Darko to jump and briefly aim the gun at the animal. The cat nonchalantly made her way over to the club chair where she had been earlier and jumped onto it.

“So you and Mr. Vandermeer were lovers?” Darko said, turning his attention back to Lynn. He lowered the gun.

“Yes.” Lynn was relieved not to be staring into the gun barrel.

“Okay,” Darko said. “Lovers or not, I don’t give a fuck, but from now on, you leave the investigation of his anesthesia problem to the hospital authorities. Let it drop. Understand?”

“Yes.”

Darko straightened up. He then walked over to the desk, giving Lynn a moment of relative respite. He used the index finger of his free right hand to move some of the anesthesia segments around. “What is this?” Darko demanded. “Was this part of Vandermeer’s anesthesia record you cut up?”

Lynn nodded again. A new fear gripped her, sending a shiver down her spine. What if this intruder found out what she had so recently discovered? As significant as she thought it was, especially now that she was being told to stop her investigations by this hoodlum, would he then kill her rather than just warn her?

“Get over here!” Darko demanded.

Reluctantly Lynn got to her feet. She momentarily felt dizzy but made it over to the desk.

“What the hell were you doing cutting it up into pieces?”

Lynn hesitated, her mind in high gear. She knew she had to talk or the man might strike her again. But she didn’t want to tell the truth. Instead she started to describe how the anesthesia machine monitored the patient’s vital signs, going into details that she either knew or made up on the spot. For more than five minutes she produced a word salad that would have made a true schizophrenic proud, never getting around to why she had resorted to scissors.

“All right, all right!” Darko yelled. “Shut the fuck up!” He gave her a forceful shove that sent her stumbling back to the couch. She sat down and again hugged herself and crossed her legs in a vain attempt to feel protected. She saw him look at his watch. Wondering why, she glanced up at the clock on the mantel. It was past midnight. Was he expecting someone else to come?

“All right, let’s review,” Darko said. “You and your friend are going to go back to being full-time medical students, am I right?”

Lynn nodded, though she didn’t know how Michael was going to respond to threats of violence by this lowlife.

“I warn you that if you don’t, we will kill both of you. You tell that to your friend.”

Lynn nodded. She would tell him, all right.

“Say it!”

“Yes!”

“Now let me add to the consequence of noncompliance.”

All of a sudden Lynn recognized the man’s accent. It was Russian. Now that she had identified it, she didn’t know why she hadn’t earlier but assumed it was because of her terror. The accent wasn’t heavy, and the man was very fluent in English.

“I know about your family. I know where your mother, Naomi, lives, and I know where your two sisters, Brynn and Jill, are going to college. I also know all about your friend’s family. If you don’t follow my orders, we will kill them all. I have killed many people in my life and a few more means nothing to me. Do we have an understanding?”

The blood drained from Lynn’s face. She believed this blackguard implicitly. Up until that moment the idea that her family and Michael’s could be at risk from her actions had not even occurred to her. Now, suddenly, she knew differently, and saw the whole affair in a much more dangerous context.

“Needless to say, the same consequence will result if you say anything to the police. In fact, if you tell anyone about our meeting other than your involved friend, you and everyone I named will be killed. Is that perfectly clear?”

Lynn nodded. She wasn’t sure she could speak.

“And one more thing,” Darko said. “After we are finished, I want you to leave this house and not come back.”

“Why?” Lynn asked, finding her voice.

“You are not in a position to ask questions,” Darko said. “Just do it.”

“But I need to feed the cat,” Lynn said. She pointed to the sleeping pet.

With a sidelong glance, Darko raised the pistol in his hand, aimed, and fired. There was a concussive hiss, and Pep’s body jolted. The cat raised her head briefly before collapsing.

“Feeding the cat is no longer a requirement,” Darko said.

Lynn’s lower jaw had dropped open. She couldn’t believe that this goon had just shot the cat.

“Enough!” Darko said. “Time for fun.” He confidently laid the pistol on the desk before walking back toward the sofa. About three feet away he stopped. “Now I want you to take off that bathrobe.”

A jolt went through Lynn’s body. This awful episode was not over. Afraid he would hit her again if she didn’t comply, she slowly untied the belt and then slipped her arms out of the robe, letting it puddle around her waist so that it still covered the lower half of her body. As she did this, she kept her eyes glued to the leering eyes of the intruder, fearing the worst. The man was disturbingly unpredictable, with lightning-fast reflexes and overwhelming strength, and she worried he would explode at any second if he sensed any resistance whatsoever. As a consequence she felt totally helpless, which was a new feeling for her. In the past, when she had pondered what she would do in a circumstance of potential sexual assault like she was now facing, she had thought that her own strength, athleticism, and years of kickboxing lessons would help. Now she no longer entertained the delusion. The man had her completely cowed, and it was apparent he knew, as he was secure enough to have to put the gun down.

“All the way!” Darko commanded, arms akimbo.

Lynn reluctantly opened the robe across her lap and pulled it aside. She was now completely naked. Despite the ski mask, she could tell the despicable man was smiling.

“Now,” Darko said. “I want you to give me head!”

36.

Wednesday, April 8, 12:07 A.M.

With a feeling of overwhelming disgust, Lynn tensed her muscles to move forward off the couch with the intent of getting to her knees. All sorts of things were flashing through her mind, such as making a mad dash for the gun or butting the man in the groin with her head or even biting off the tip of his penis, but she knew she would do nothing, out of pure fear for her life.

Suddenly a high, piercing scream shattered the silence, making Lynn think she was about to jump out of her skin. She blinked by reflex and raised her arms to fend off a blow, but she wasn’t hit. Instead the intruder shot forward and plowed into her, crushing her against the back of the couch. The man’s arms had shot out on either side of Lynn to break his fall. A grunt of air escaped from his mouth.

For a few seconds Lynn couldn’t move or even breathe for the sheer weight of the writhing mass bearing down on her. In the next instant she realized she was being pressed against the back of the couch by two men, not one, and there was a mad scramble for dominance. Someone had rushed into the room and tackled the intruder.

Darko, too, had been caught from behind totally by surprise. With his extensive training and combat experience he knew that he was dealing with someone his own size or even larger. Using his honed martial arts skills, he was able to break the hold the attacker had around his chest as he and his attacker rolled off the couch and fell onto the floor. In the next second he was on his feet, but so was the attacker, who came at him again. This time the attacker had him face-to-face in a bear hug, and with his legs pumping, he drove Darko back against the wall of the room. Darko could now see that he was right. The man was bigger and more muscular. And he was black. But there was a good side: it was apparent the man was untrained in martial arts, as he was relying only on his body mass and strength.

To Lynn’s shock, it was Michael! Oblivious to her nakedness, Lynn leaped from the couch and rushed for the desk. She had never handled a gun, but didn’t care. Reaching the desk, she snapped up the pistol with both hands, slipping her right index finger into the trigger guard. Spinning around, she pointed the gun at the two struggling men and ran over to a point several paces away.

“Stop!” Lynn shouted.

The men ignored her. They were momentarily locked in an embrace and strained against each other. Michael had Darko’s arms pinned to his sides.

“Stop!” Lynn shouted yet again. To get their attention she fired the gun, unprepared and surprised by its recoil. She had aimed at a framed print hanging on the wall and had scored a direct hit. The combination of the suppressed sound of the gun and the tinkle of the shattered glass made the men pause. Michael let go of his hold on Darko.

Darko responded like the professional he was. He delivered a sharp karate blow to Michael and in the next instant disarmed Lynn with a fearsome kick. His foot hit the pistol with such force that the gun shot up and glanced off the ceiling. It ended up near the fireplace with a clatter, snapping off the silencer. In the next instant Darko was gone.

It had all happened so fast that for a second both Lynn and Michael were too stunned to move or even talk. They merely stared at each other. Michael was the first to recover, and he flew out of the room in pursuit. Lynn was momentarily frozen in place, holding her numbed hand with the other.

Within seconds Michael was back. “He’s gone,” he said breathlessly. Lynn threw herself at him, sobbing in relief. The fact that she was naked didn’t even occur to her.

“Hold off, girl!” Michael said. He pulled Lynn’s arms from around his neck and immediately went for the gun. As he did so, Lynn went for the bathrobe that was crumbled in a heap on the couch.

Michael snatched up the gun and checked the magazine. There were still plenty of rounds available. He unscrewed the broken portion of the silencer and tossed it aside. He could tell the gun was operable.

Lynn rushed over and again enveloped him in an embrace. For a full minute she just held on to him and again cried. After what she had been through, she thought Michael was heaven sent. A miracle.

“It’s okay,” Michael soothed. His heart was pounding in his chest. His breathing was returning to a semblance of normal.

Finally Lynn leaned back so that she could look Michael in the eye. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you,” she repeated. “How did you know I was in trouble?”

“I didn’t,” Michael admitted. “But I wasn’t willing to take the risk to let you stay here alone. You were really stressed out on the phone. I called you right back as soon as I got rid of Vlad, but your phone immediately went to voice mail. Considering how stressed out you sounded, I suppose I thought the worst, like maybe you’d do something to yourself. I don’t know. I didn’t agonize. I ran over to the hospital and jumped in a cab.”

“Thank God you did. But how did you know to come storming in here?”

“That was easy. When I got to the front door, I could see someone busted in.”

“That asshole was about to rape me!” Lynn said angrily, fighting back more tears. “You were in the nick of time.”

“Do you have any idea who he is?”

“I don’t! I couldn’t see his face under that mask. But I can tell you one thing that might not be a surprise. He had a goddamned Russian accent.”

“Why would that not surprise me?” Michael asked. He was confused.

“Wait till I tell you why he came in here and scared the hell out of me. But first let’s get the fuck out of here in case he or any of his buddies come back. I imagine he is pretty pissed at you for interrupting his fantasy, the prick. He was going to make me give him a blow job.”

“We are not going to call the police?”

“Hell no!” Lynn said. “This is all a lot bigger than a breaking-and-entering or even rape. I have a lot to tell you, but first, let me get my clothes. Come with me! I don’t want to be alone. And bring the gun.”

Lynn rushed back to the master bath, where she’d left her things, and dressed rapidly.

Michael followed close behind. He kept hold of the gun dangling at his side. “If we don’t report this, we might be considered accessories after the fact,” he said. “I just want you to know. And this gun might be hot.”

“At this point I couldn’t care less,” Lynn said. Then, as she slipped on her shoes, she added: “Did you see Carl’s poor cat in the club chair?”

“No, why?”

“The bastard shot the cat for no reason,” Lynn said. “He killed the poor thing!”

“Probably to intimidate you.”

“Well, it worked. The guy’s a narcissistic sociopath, loud and clear, that much I can tell you. He bragged about how many people he has killed.”

“Should I call a taxi?”

“No! I don’t want to wait around for a cab. We’ll take Carl’s Cherokee. I’ll get it back here in a day or so. But before we leave I want to put the study back together and get the poor cat out of the house. There shouldn’t be any evidence of a struggle. And what about the front door?”

“What do you mean?”

“How bad is it? Will it close?”

“It’s off one of its hinges and the jamb is split near the striker plate,” Michael said, “but I think we can get it to close.”

“It just has to look okay,” Lynn said.

“Wait a sec,” Michael added. For the first time he noticed Lynn’s lip laceration and the welt on her cheek. “He hurt you, the bastard. Let me see!”

Lynn waved him off. “It’s nothing. Let’s clean up the place and get the hell out of here!”

37.

Wednesday, April 8, 12:37 A.M.

Michael and Lynn lost little time getting out of the house. Dealing with the study had been easy. They picked up the broken glass, doctored the bullet hole in the print so that it wasn’t visible except up close, and righted the frame on the wall. After a short discussion, they put Pep in a double trash bag with the idea of finding a garbage can or a Dumpster to get rid of it. Lynn was squeamish about the choice but couldn’t think of anything else in the press of time. The front door had been more of a challenge, but with Lynn pulling from the inside and Michael pushing from the outside, they got it back into its jamb and secure. It was literally wedged into place. Lynn had to use the back door to get out. They met up at the garage.

With Lynn feeling shaky from her ordeal, she was happy to take Michael up on his offer to drive. Several blocks away at a construction site, they found a convenient Dumpster. At the last minute the gun and the broken silencer went into the trash bag with the cat. They were relieved to have gotten rid of it all.

As soon as they started north, Lynn filled him in on what had happened. “The goon threatened to kill me,” she said to begin, trying to keep herself calm. Merely thinking about the episode got her heart racing all over again. She twisted in her seat to be able to look directly at Michael. The headlights of the oncoming traffic shining through the windshield played across his face. “Actually, he threatened to kill us both.”

Michael shot her a surprised look. “He said my name?”

“He didn’t say your name. To be exact he said, ‘You and your friend have pissed off a lot of people in high places.’”

“He actually said ‘people in high places’?”

“Those were his exact words. He said we, ‘will kill you and your friend if you don’t leave the investigation of Carl’s case to the hospital authorities and go back to being full-time medical students.’ Well, maybe those weren’t his exact words, but pretty damn close.”

“And he said ‘we,’ not ‘I,’ when he was talking about killing us?”

“Absolutely.”

“Terms like ‘people in high places’ and the pronoun ‘we’ make this sound more and more like a fucking major conspiracy.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Lynn said. “We’ve stumbled onto a hornets’ nest. And my tête-à-tête with the goon got worse. He threatened killing my mother and my sisters if we went to the police. He even knew their names and where they were. That takes resources and connections.”

“Did he include me at that point?”

“Yes! Your family, too!” Lynn shook her head in disbelief that this was all happening. She turned around and faced forward in her seat. They were nearing the commercial center of historic Charleston. Lynn looked at the revelers, surprised at how many there were despite the hour. She wished her life were so simple.

“So that’s why you didn’t want to call the police?”

“Partially. The other reason is that uncovering whatever this conspiracy is all about certainly is a hell of a lot more important than nabbing this single shit-ass psychopath. The idea of ‘people in high places’ being involved blows me away. Something major is in the works, and I think it concerns Sidereal Pharmaceuticals with its Russian connection, and you know how I feel about pharmaceutical companies.”

“I know you are not a fan,” Michael said.

“That’s putting it mildly, whereas I actually hate them,” Lynn said with enough venom to cause Michael to glance over at her.

“Brang it on, woman! Wow! You’re big-time wound up about the drug business. What’s the beef?”

“Where to start?” Lynn said. She sighed and looked back at Michael. “I know we agree on the basics from conversations we’ve had in the past, like the pharmaceutical industry’s hypocrisy. They want people to think their motivation is for the public good when they are, in fact, poster boys for capitalism run amok.”

“You mean how they justify their out-of-the-ballpark prices supposedly because of how much money they have to spend on research.”

“You got it!” Lynn said with disgust. “The reality is that they spend more money on advertising prescription drugs directly to the public than they spend on research. And that doesn’t even include the money they spend on lobbyists and politicians.”

“We agree on all that,” Michael said. “But I’m sensing a lot more emotion here on your part.”

“Did I ever tell you that my father died because he couldn’t afford the medication that would have kept him alive?”

“No, you haven’t,” Michael said, taken aback. Michael knew that Lynn, like him, was never completely open about her childhood, but, considering all their discussions about medical care, he was surprised she had never shared this information about her father’s death.

“That’s right!” Lynn snapped, staring out through the windshield. “To stay alive he had to take the drug for the rest of his life, and it costs almost a half million dollars a year. It’s obscene.”

“Really?” Michael asked. “There’s a drug that costs five hundred thousand dollars a year?”

“It’s a monoclonal antibody, or biologic, like the drozitumab you saw on the front of Ashanti’s record. My father lost his job in the 2008 subprime catastrophe and ultimately his health insurance. He died because we couldn’t afford to pay for the drug.”

“That sucks,” Michael said. “Big-time!”

“Tell me about it! Anyway, I’m thinking Sidereal is doing something damning, maybe using people in the Shapiro for clinical trials, like we said. Yet somehow it seems overkill to me for us to get death threats for that unless they are somehow behind these anesthesia disasters.”

“You mean to create more subjects?” Michael asked, aghast at the idea.

“I know, it sounds too dastardly to even think about, but who’s to know? The only way I can think of possibly finding out is going into the Shapiro. If nothing else, once we are in there, I can use one of the terminals in the network operations center where you visited and look at their data. Of course that brings up the question of how you did tonight with your buddy Vladimir.”

Michael chuckled. “It was a slammin’ good time. Really, the guy’s got a good vibe and a good heart. He even brought me a souvenir, like he promised. I got to show it to you. It’s called a matryoshka doll. There’s one inside the other for about fifteen dolls, the last being a tiny thing.”

“Did you get the Shapiro scrubs?” Lynn asked, totally uninterested in the doll.

“No problem. We have two, just like you wanted, including hats and masks.”

“One set will be enough,” Lynn said. “I’m thinking I should go in by myself. This whole affair is getting more and more serious and risky. I think it is my battle, because of Carl.”

“We’ve been over this,” Michael said. “Case closed! We both go or neither of us goes.”

“We’ll see,” Lynn said. “How about the thumbprint?”

“I’m sure I got that, too. He had a couple of beers, and I was careful with the bottles. There should be plenty of prints.”

“Excellent,” Lynn said. They passed the ramp that led up to the Ravenel Bridge to Mount Pleasant. It was marked by a large overhead traffic sign. The name of the town reminded her of the horrific home invasion that they had learned about from the TV in the surgical lounge. The mother had been a patient at the Mason-Dixon Medical Center and had been diagnosed with a blood protein abnormality. All at once, the confusing gammopathy issue came back into her overstressed mind.

“There’s another aspect of all this that troubles me,” Lynn said, trying to organize her thoughts. She still felt shaky and discombobulated from what she had been through with the Russian goon. “It’s this gammopathy stuff. It keeps popping up. Before that bastard broke in, I learned something curious that I can’t explain. Remember those stats I got down in the IT office about the discharge diagnosis of gammopathy and multiple myeloma from the Mason-Dixon Med Center?”

“I remember,” Michael said. “But not the actual numbers.”

“The actual numbers don’t matter,” Lynn said. “The significant issue is that the number of people on discharge with these two diagnoses is five times the national average. Five times!”

Michael nodded as he considered what Lynn had just told him, but he didn’t say anything.

“Doesn’t that surprise you?” Lynn asked. She couldn’t believe he was seemingly taking it in stride.

“It surprises me,” Michael said. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that the number of people coming into our hospital with an unrelated illness and leaving with a diagnosis of a blood serum abnormality is five times the national average?”

“That’s exactly what I am saying. And to make it more confusing, most of these patients are relatively young, in their thirties and forties, whereas gammopathy usually appears in an older population, like people in their sixties.”

“And patients with a discharge diagnosis of multiple myeloma is five times more common in our hospital.”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Okay, how do you explain it?”

“I don’t,” Lynn snapped. “That’s why I’m bringing it up, for Chrissake.”

“Okay, keep it cool, girl,” Michael said calmly. “We’re on the same team here.”

“Sorry,” Lynn said. She took a deep breath to calm down.

“Is discovering this gammopathy and multiple myeloma info what had you ‘totally unglued’ and upset when you called me earlier?”

“Oh my gosh, no!” Lynn blurted. She swung back around to face Michael, thumping her forehead with her knuckles in mock punishment. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you my most important discovery. The anesthesia records show that in all three cases the tracing had been looped.”

Michael shot a quick glance at Lynn to make sure she wasn’t jerking him around. “Looped, as in being played over and over?”

“Exactly,” Lynn said, with her voice reflecting her sudden excitement. “From the moment of the frame offset in each record, the records were looped with the minute prior to that point, when everything was normal. It means that from the frame offset until the low-oxygen alarm sounded, the anesthesia machine wasn’t recording the patient’s real-time vital signs. Those signals were interrupted, and the looping was giving the false impression that everything was normal.”

“That’s serious shit,” Michael said.

“The question is, could it be a software glitch?”

“I can’t imagine,” Michael said. “It has to be a hack job, and if it is, who’s doing it and why? Holy shit!”

“It has to be all tied together,” Lynn said.

“What do you mean?” Michael asked. He turned into the hospital grounds and headed for the multilevel garage.

“What’s going on in Anesthesia has to be connected somehow with the protein abnormalities.”

“That seems far-fetched,” Michael said.

“I thought so at first. But remember what we learned last year in diagnostics: even when symptoms seem entirely unrelated, they are almost invariably part of the same underlying disease. My intuition tells me we are going to find the same here with the abnormal proteins and the anesthesia disasters.”

“If they are associated, I can’t think how,” Michael said.

“Nor can I,” Lynn admitted. “I might be delusional, but I can’t stop thinking that I have to get into the Shapiro, even if just to get access to their records.”

“We, white man,” Michael said, again making reference to Ron Metzner’s Lone Ranger joke. “We’re a team, girl. There’s no way I’m going to let you go into Shapiro by yourself. If this is some major conspiracy, the risks go up.”

“It will be your decision if we get to that point,” Lynn said. “There’s still that thumbprint access that has to be overcome.”

They left Carl’s Cherokee in a visitor parking spot and walked across the hospital campus toward the medical dorm, a bit overwhelmed by what they had experienced and what they had been talking about. Neither one spoke, particularly as they passed the dark, nearly windowless Shapiro Institute. Both were now thinking about Carl being locked away in its bowels. It made it personal.

Such thinking was the hardest for Lynn, as it immediately evoked a combination of guilt, benumbing anger, and crushing loss, threatening her life on so many levels. She had to look away from the massive, sinister-looking building and force herself to think of something else. “I guess I’m going to have to make an effort to look like I’m back to being a medical student.”

“Hallelujah, woman!” Michael exclaimed. “If we are dealing with a major conspiracy that’s uptight about us asking questions about Carl, then we gotta believe somebody is going to be keeping tabs on us.”

“Sounds so Orwellian,” Lynn said.

“I hope this means you’re planning on coming to the ophthalmology lecture in the morning?”

“I guess I have no choice.”

As they rode up in the elevator they leaned against opposite sides, regarding each other.

“Are you okay?” Michael asked.

“I’m a basket case,” Lynn admitted. “I’m wasted and I’m still shaky. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired and drained. I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.”

“Will you be able to sleep?”

“I hope so.”

“I might be able to find an errant sleeping pill if you’d like.”

“I’d like,” Lynn said. “And I do have yet another request.”

“Hit me!”

“Would you mind if I dragged my mattress down to your room? I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“Not a problem, as long as you don’t take advantage of me.”

“Under the circumstances, I don’t find that at all funny.”

“Sorry!”

38.

Wednesday, April 8, 9:22 A.M.

Lynn put her pen down on top of her spiral notebook. She had been trying to take lecture notes but wasn’t able to concentrate. She was distracted by the previous night’s horrific experience and what she had learned from the anesthesia records. To make matters worse, the lecturer spoke in an all too typical medical-school monotone. On top of that, the subject matter seemed to her to be truly stultifying. As beautiful as the eye was in its overall structure, this minutiae of the retinal circulation was overkill in relation to what she would need to know once she was a practicing orthopedic surgeon. Even if eye surgery had the benefit of being short and bloodless, she couldn’t understand why her friend Karen Washington wanted to study ophthalmology as a specialty. After spending four years learning about the whole body, it seemed much too narrow in scope from her perspective.

Adding to her inability to focus, Lynn felt groggy, despite having slept for more than six hours. Six hours was about normal for her, but what she had experienced last night had not been entirely normal sleep. She had taken the Ambien tablet Michael had found for her. As she rarely took sleep meds, she was sensitive to them, and when she did use one, she invariably felt a residual hangover.

When she had awakened that morning just before eight on her mattress on the floor of Michael’s room, Michael was already in the shower. It had been the sound of the shower turning on that had aroused her from her drugged slumber. She didn’t get up immediately as it had taken her a few minutes to unscramble her brain and try to put in perspective what had happened the previous evening.

There had been a few times during her first year in college when she’d found herself in mildly problematic situations involving the potential of sexual assault, thanks mostly to alcohol, but she’d never suffered an actual episode. Actually, it had never even come close until last night. The mere thought of how close made her feel almost nauseous. Never had she felt quite so thankful and appreciative of Michael’s friendship, size, and strength. If he hadn’t thrown caution to the wind the night before when he couldn’t get ahold of her on her mobile and when he attacked the intruder, she knew she’d be feeling very differently at that moment.

After sticking her head into Michael’s steamy bathroom to yell at him that she’d be ready to head over to the hospital in a half hour, she carefully collected the beer bottles Vladimir had handled and went back to her own room. Making sure not to touch the bottles, to avoid messing up any of the Russian’s fingerprints, she put them on her desk before getting into the shower herself.

On the way from the dorm to the hospital, Lynn and Michael talked about the paranoia that came with the worry that they were possibly being watched. To both of them, everyone who eyed them looked suspicious, even a couple of the gardeners working in the flower beds who happened to glance up as they passed.

For the first twenty minutes of the ophthalmology lecture, Lynn had tried her best to pay attention, but it wasn’t working. When the lecturer turned off the lights once again to go through another series of slides, this time showing fluorescence angiography studies of the back of the eye, she leaned over to Michael, who was sitting next to her as both had taken seats near the door: “I’m outta here,” she whispered.

“I thought the deal was that you were going to make it look like you were back to being a full-time medical student.”

“My mind’s going a mile a minute. I can’t sit still and can’t concentrate worth a damn. I’ve got a couple of errands to run.”

“What I’m worried about is what you might do. Don’t try to get yourself into the Shapiro without me or you and I will be having one hell of a beef!”

“I wouldn’t think of it. Take good notes for me!”

“Screw you! You gotta stay and take your own goddamn notes. It’s not like I’m enjoying myself. This guy is trying to put us to sleep.”

Lynn had to smile. After a quick glance at the lecturer, who had his back to the audience while using a laser pointer to indicate a subtle detail, she stood up and headed for the nearest exit. To make it look like she would be returning, she left her spiral notebook on the arm of her chair. She knew Michael would bring it back without having to be told.

Once outside the lecture room, Lynn went directly to the restroom. Her thinking was that if anybody was watching her, going to the bathroom wouldn’t raise any suspicions. As she walked, she tried to see if anyone in particular took note. No one did.

As long as she was in the restroom, Lynn decided to use the toilet. Afterward she looked at herself in the mirror, thinking she looked like death warmed over. There were dark circles under her eyes and her split lip was crusted with a small scab. There were also a few broken capillaries over her cheekbone that she had tried to cover up with a bit of makeup. She used a damp paper towel to get rid of the crust on her lip.

After combing out her hair and putting it back into her barrette in an attempt to look as presentable as possible, Lynn walked out of the restroom. At first she headed in the general direction of the lecture hall, all the while scanning the busy clinic area for anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to her. Except for a few waiting patients who responded to her white coat in hopes it meant the ophthalmology clinic was about to begin seeing patients, no one seemed to give her a second look.

Deciding she was in the clear, Lynn headed over to the hospital. Since she’d awakened that morning she had given a lot of thought to the “looping” she’d discovered in the anesthesia records. She knew it had to be seriously significant and that someone had to be told, and the sooner the better. Initially she’d thought of Dr. Rhodes, but had quickly nixed the idea after remembering his ranting the day before. It also occurred to her that if there was a major conspiracy there was a chance that Rhodes, as head of Anesthesia, might possibly be involved on some level. She thought the chances small, but not nonexistent. Ultimately she settled on letting Dr. Wykoff know. After a lot of thought, she’d come to agree with Michael that the woman was shaken by what had happened to Carl, and if that were the case, the chances of her being involved in some grand conspiracy seemed nil.

Once in the crush of the hospital, Lynn wasn’t as worried about being observed. There were just too many people. Going to the information booth near the front door, she got a piece of hospital stationery and wrote a short explanation of the looping she’d found in the three cases. There was nothing else in the short note, not even a signature. She folded the paper and slipped it into a hospital envelope and sealed it. On the outside she wrote simply: Dr. Wykoff.

With the envelope in hand she went back to the main elevators. In the packed car, she felt a touch of paranoia and wondered why in hell she hadn’t taken the stairs. One of the passengers was a uniformed security guard who seemed to be staring at her. She wasn’t certain, but it made her uneasy. She had always found the strained silence of packed elevators mildly unsettling. On this particular day it was even more so. She was glad that the man didn’t get off with her on two.

Lynn’s plan had been simple. She would find out which room Dr. Wykoff was in and then find a circulating nurse to take the message to the doctor. Lynn even went so far as to take her name tag off her white coat to remain anonymous.

Gazing at the monitor in the surgical lounge that listed all the morning cases, Lynn searched for Dr. Wykoff’s name. When she didn’t see it, she started at the top again. Only then did she decide it wasn’t there. Apparently Dr. Wykoff was not scheduled that morning.

Lynn cursed her luck under her breath. It had been her understanding that all the more junior anesthesiologists, like Dr. Wykoff, were scheduled every day. She couldn’t understand why it wasn’t to be today. Instead Lynn walked down to the anesthesia office, where she and Michael had met Dr. Wykoff the previous day. When no one responded to her knocking, Lynn opened the door and looked in. The room was empty. What she did find was a bank of cubbyholes with one for Dr. Wykoff.

For a moment Lynn debated what to do. She wanted to make sure that someone actually put her note in Dr. Wykoff’s hand rather than just leaving it, in hopes she might get it. Finally accepting the inevitable, Lynn went back to the woman’s locker room and changed into scrubs.

Although most people didn’t put masks on until they were in an operating room with a case under way, Lynn put one on in the locker room to mask her identity just as she had done Monday, looking for Carl. She didn’t know if she was being excessively paranoid, but she didn’t care. With her note in hand, she pushed into the OR proper and went to the hectically busy main desk. At that time in the morning, a number of the ORs were in the process of moving from their first cases to their second. Everybody was busy.

Lynn had to wait several minutes. She knew that Geraldine Montgomery, the OR head nurse, would be the best person to ask about Dr. Wykoff, but she was already being besieged by several other people. In the meantime, Lynn checked the white board in case there had been a change. Dr. Wykoff still was not listed. When Lynn finally had an opportunity, she said she was looking for Dr. Wykoff.

“You and everyone else,” Geraldine said with a laugh. “She’s AWOL!”

“What do you mean?” Lynn said, but she didn’t get an answer right away. She had to wait for Geraldine to shout to someone across the hall to stop dillydallying and get the patient down to four, pronto.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Geraldine said, glancing back at Lynn. “What did you say?”

Lynn had to repeat her question.

“For the first time in I don’t know how many years, Dr. Wykoff didn’t show up this morning. It was so unusual that Dr. Rhodes called the police. Apparently Dr. Wykoff had some sort of family emergency. She packed a bag and is gone to parts unknown. At least that is what we’ve been told.”

Stunned, Lynn crumpled the envelope, thanked Geraldine, who didn’t respond because she had already been drawn into another issue, and went back the locker room to get out of her scrubs. This story about Dr. Wykoff was totally unexpected and unsettling. Getting the note about the “looping” to the woman was to ease her guilt about not communicating her extraordinary discovery to anyone, but now, being unable to do it because of the anesthesiologist’s uncharacteristic disappearance, only made her that much more upset, especially since she couldn’t think of anyone else to tell.

39.

Wednesday, April 8, 11:02 A.M.

Having to deal with this new conundrum of Dr. Wykoff’s unexpected disappearance, Lynn knew that she would find trying to suffer through the ophthalmology clinic as bad as the lecture. Instead, she had decided to use the time to solve the problem of getting a floor plan for the Shapiro. To that end, she’d gotten Carl’s Jeep out of the parking garage and headed downtown.

It seemed particularly auspicious to her to find a parking spot on Calhoun Street directly in front of the Charleston County Public Library with time still on the meter. What made it so convenient was that the library was just across the street from 75 Calhoun, the impressive and relatively new municipal building that housed the Charleston Building Commission.

Lynn hurried inside. She wanted to find the right office well before the lunch hour. From her experience with city bureaucracy in Atlanta, where she had grown up, she knew that midday was a time to avoid, as civil servants became progressively distracted and unhelpful. But she soon learned she needn’t have worried. Not only was the building commission easy to find but the people behind the counter immediately gave her the impression they were there to help, particularly a balding, jovial, and colorful fellow named George Murray. The man wore bright-red suspenders to keep his pants up despite a particularly protuberant abdomen. When he saw Lynn’s white coat and correctly guessed she was a medical student, he laughed and told her to go ahead and give him the standard lecture on potential evil consequences of his beer belly. “I like my suds,” he confessed. “Anyway, what can I do to help you?”

“An architect friend has told me that you would have plans available for public buildings, like hospitals.”

“Provided the hospital is in Charleston,” George said with a laugh. “Plans have to be submitted and approved to get a building permit. It’s all in the public domain. What hospital are you curious about?”

Lynn paused, trying to think of how much she wanted to reveal. The last thing she wanted was for it to get back to the dean or anyone at the school or the hospital that she was in the building commission asking for plans for the Shapiro. But she didn’t see any way around the issue. “The Shapiro Institute,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t regret admitting it. The trouble was that, without plans, she worried that she might not get much benefit from making the effort to break into the Shapiro other than possibly accessing the institute’s electronic medical records. She wanted to maximize the chances of finding Carl, which she knew might not be easy among a thousand or so patients unless she had a pretty good idea how the place was laid out.

“That’s part of the Mason-Dixon Medical Center,” George said without hesitation. “What kind of plans are you interested in?”

“I don’t really know,” Lynn admitted. “What kind of plans do you have?”

“There’s floor plans, electrical plans, HVAC plans, plumbing plans. You name it, we have it.”

“I guess I’m mainly interested in floor plans.”

“Let’s see what’s available in the file,” George said agreeably. He was gone for only a few minutes before returning with a very large burgundy-colored folder tied with string.

George heaved the folder onto the countertop and opened it. He slid out the contents. “We are gradually going digital, but we’ve got a long way to go.” He pawed through the material, eventually locating the floor plans. They were bound on one side with staples. “Here you go. Knock yourself out!”

Lynn flipped through some of the pages. She’d seen architectural floor plans before and knew something about how to read them. What surprised her right off was that although the building had a relatively low silhouette in real life, suggesting it was about two to three stories tall when compared with the attached hospital building, it was actually six stories, with four being below grade. “Which is ground level?” she asked.

George turned the plans around so that he could read all the small print. “Apparently it is the one labeled the fifth floor,” he said, comparing the floor plans with their accompanying elevations. He turned the pages of the floor plans until he was on five. “Doesn’t look like it has many external doors leading outside. Strange, but I’m sure it was cleared by the fire department. Must have a damn good sprinkler system. What kind of hospital is this?”

“It’s for people in a vegetative state,” Lynn said. She turned the plans back around and, by looking at the fifth floor, was able to locate the connection with the hospital proper and see the conference room she had been in for her tour during second year. She could also see the three patient visiting rooms. She was also able to locate the door Michael had used when he entered the building with Vladimir. Down a short hall from the door was a room labeled NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER. She guessed that was what Michael had called the NOC. Immediately adjacent to it was a room for computer servers, and across the hall was a room labeled LOCKER ROOM. So far, so good.

“What’s a vegetative state? You mean people in a coma?”

“Yes, but they are not all in a coma. Some of them have sleep-wake cycles, which unfortunately often gives families unjustified hope they are going to wake up completely. Anyway, the hospital is for people with brain damage who cannot take care of themselves in even the most basic ways. They all need a lot of attention. It takes a lot of effort on the part of the nursing staff.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“It is,” Lynn agreed. She noticed that beyond the NOC was a hallway off of which was a profusion of rooms. Some were labeled as SUPPLY ROOM. Many were labeled AUTOMATION ROOM, whatever that meant. One was labeled AUTOMATION CONTROL. A few weren’t labeled at all. Two of the largest rooms were named CLUSTER A and CLUSTER B and also could be reached from the same hallway. Lynn remembered that Michael had said that on the first page of Ashanti’s record it had Cluster 4-B 32. Lynn now guessed that these were the spaces where patients were housed. Apparently Ashanti was on the fourth floor, or the first subterranean floor in the B cluster room.

“What do you think Cluster A and B refer to?” Lynn asked, just to see what George might say.

“No idea,” George said. “But I can tell you one thing: they are good-sized rooms and look like they need a lot of electrical power.”

“They are narrow in comparison to this open space in the middle,” Lynn said. The area she was pointing to was a large rectangle, and it occupied the center of the building. Around its entire periphery was a hallway that could be reached from the cluster rooms.

George looked at the space on the floor plan but appeared confused. He turned the plans around again, but there was nothing to read. It was just a blank space. He then shook his head and said: “I don’t know for sure what it is. Maybe it is a space open above and below. Let’s check the fourth floor.” George flipped the page over. “I was right. On the fourth floor it is definitely a room, which is open above, apparently all the way to the roof. That is a hell of a room. It’s got a three-story ceiling.”

Lynn studied the space that now was labeled RECREATION, and a door at each end. Otherwise, the fourth floor looked like the fifth. “What do you think it is?”

George scratched his bald pate, appearing as confused as ever. “If I had to guess, I’d say a gym! If I had to be more specific, I’d say a basketball gym. I know that sounds ridiculous, but the dimensions are about right. But I don’t know what all the wiring is in the floor.”

“There can’t be a gym in a hospital for comatose people,” Lynn said.

“Maybe it’s for the staff. You know, to let off a little steam. You said it is hard to take care of these vegetative patients.”

“I suppose it is possible,” Lynn said. “Let’s see what’s on the other floors.” She flipped a page back to see the third floor. It was just like the fifth floor, with the center space a bank. Same with the second floor. Then the first floor was a mirror image of the fourth, with the center space labeled RECREATION, and with the same wiring in the floor. “Two gyms?” Lynn said in disbelief.

“One for the men and one for the women,” George said with a laugh that suggested he wasn’t serious. “Why are you looking at plans? Are you going to visit?”

“I already have,” Lynn said. She told George of the limited visit given to her and her class. “Unfortunately all we saw was a tiny bit of the fifth floor. Needless to say, we have been curious ever since. That’s why I wanted to look at the plans.”

“Do you want to see anything more in this file?” George said, motioning to the stack.

“Do you think any of the other plans might give us a hint as to what the gym area really might be?”

“Don’t know!” George said. He pulled out the electrical plans and quickly flipped through them. “I don’t have any better idea about the gym, but I can tell you that the whole place must be highly automated. Seems to me there is enough power to run a manufacturing plant.” He tossed aside the electrical plans and pulled out plumbing. After he scanned them he remarked, “Wow! The place also uses a lot of water. The specified intake pipes are huge. Maybe those big rooms aren’t gyms but swimming pools. Just kidding!” Next he looked at the HVAC details. He was again impressed. “This is one interesting hospital, young lady. Look at this!”

George spun around the plans so that Lynn could read the labels.

“What am I looking at?” The plans looked superficially like the floor plans but were overlaid with all sorts of dotted lines, symbols, and labels similar to those on the electrical plans. She had to lean over to read some of the labels, which said things like FLOOR LEVEL RETURN or MAIN INDUCTION.

“This is an impressive HVAC system, which stands for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning,” George said. “Look at the size of these ducts, particularly from the gyms.” He pointed with a stubby index finger. Lynn wasn’t sure what he was pointing to and didn’t really care, but she didn’t want to appear disinterested since he was being so helpful. She was appreciative that he didn’t just hand her the file folder and leave her to her own devices.

“They can probably change the air in those gyms at will,” George said. “I worked for an air-conditioning company before I snared this city job. Much better benefits. You have no idea.”

“Why would they want to change the air in the gyms so quickly?” Lynn asked.

George shrugged his shoulders. “It’s pretty typical for well-designed gyms.”

“So you are saying that by looking at these HVAC plans you think these large rooms really are gyms.”

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” George confessed. “But I do see that the HVAC system is actually tied in with the system in the hospital proper. That’s where the cooling towers are and all the elaborate filter systems hospitals have to have. I bet that saved a bundle.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Lynn said. She felt that she had gotten the basics of what she needed. “You have really been very helpful.”

“It’s not every day that I get to help a good-looking medical student,” George said with a wink.

Good grief, Lynn thought but didn’t say. George was now ruining it by being patronizing. She hoped to hell he wasn’t going to ask her out for a drink.

“Would you like any copies of these plans?” George added, totally unaware of his faux pas.

“Is that possible?” Lynn asked. The idea had not occurred to her.

“Of course it is possible,” George said. “There is a small charge for the copier, but I could run it off for you right away, before lunch.”

“That would be terrific,” Lynn said.

“What plans would you like besides the floor plans?”

Quickly Lynn took another quick glance at the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC plans. She pulled the HVAC ones free of the others. “Maybe these,” she said. All at once a contingency plan sprang into her mind. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to get into the Shapiro, or exactly what she would find, but she was enough of a realist to know the risks, and the idea of having some sort of backup appealed to her.

“I’ll be right back,” George said with another wink.

This time Lynn didn’t mind.

40.

Wednesday, April 8, 12:00 P.M.

The door to the Clinical Engineering Department opened, and Misha Zotov looked up. He always insisted on occupying the workbench closest to the entrance. It gave him an opportunity to monitor who and what came in and out. Although Fyodor Rozovsky was nominally the department head, Misha was responsible for its day-to-day operations, making sure all the computer-driven hospital equipment was running smoothly. Misha knew that Fyodor’s attention was often elsewhere, since he also was the behind-the-scenes coordinator of hospital security.

Misha put down his soldering iron when he saw who had entered. It was Darko Lebedev, who appeared mildly indisposed, with red-rimmed eyes. He was dressed as usual in a hospital security uniform, as he had been advised to wear on the rare occasions he came calling. Misha made a point of staring at his watch for a beat before speaking in Russian: “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to contact you all fucking morning.”

Darko lowered himself onto a workbench stool next to Misha, wincing, as if he had a headache or a sore back. Like Misha, he spoke in Russian. “It was a late night and a lot of vodka at the Vendue. Leonid and I met up with those Russian babes you people brought over to keep tabs on the two male anesthesiologists. They have been complaining about their charges, claiming they are boring boneheads. Leonid and I felt it was our patriotic duty to show them a proper good time, and a good time it was.”

“According to Sergei Polushin you and Leonid are supposed to be available twenty-four/seven. It is not that we have been overworking you two.”

“I’m here now,” Darko said sardonically. Confident of his reputation and of the demand for his services, he was not about to be intimidated by the likes of Misha. Darko considered the guy a mere apparatchik programmer who sucked up to Fyodor.

“How did it go last night?” Misha demanded. “Needless to say, we need to know.”

“Taking out the anesthesiologist went like a dream. No problems whatsoever.”

“I know about the anesthesiogist,” Misha snapped. “I’m referring to the damn medical students. I talked with Timur Kortnev, and he filled me in about their strange activities last night and that she ended up in Vandermeer’s house. I need to know if you think what you did was adequate so I can tell Fyodor, who wants to brief the hospital CEO.”

“I suppose I’d have to say it went reasonably,” Darko said.

“Reasonably doesn’t sound adequate, my friend, especially coming from you. Did she get the message?”

“I warned her. I even slapped her around a bit, but I never got to scare her as much as I planned.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Her friend showed up in the middle of things and got the jump on me. To make matters worse, she got ahold of the gun, and I had to get the hell out of there before I had the chance to do her.”

Misha stared at Darko with his mouth agape.

“I didn’t have any choice. If I had stayed, I would have had to kill at least one of them, if not both. I left for the good of the program.”

“Maybe it would have been better if you had killed them.”

“I wasn’t going to do that unless I knew that was what Sergei or Fyodor would have wanted. Anyway, we know she got the message.”

“How do we know?”

“Because they didn’t call the police. I told her we’d do her sisters and mother if she did, and obviously she didn’t. We would have heard.”

“Do you have any idea why she was at Vandermeer’s house?”

“She and Vandermeer were lovers.”

“Shit!” Misha snapped. “Security should have found that out before we chose him as a test subject. Getting one of our goddamned medical students involved is a fucking big-ass mistake. Now she and her friend may have to be eliminated like Wykoff to clean this up.”

“No problem, if that’s what you and Fyodor want.”

“The trouble is that eliminating a couple of socially connected medical students will ignite a hell of an investigation, something we don’t want or need.”

“That’s why I didn’t kill them last night,” Darko said.

“I’ll talk it over with Fyodor,” Misha said irritably. “But for now we will just need to keep a close eye on them. I’ll leave it up to you and Timur. She will not recognize you, will she?”

“What do you think I am, a fucking amateur?”

41.

Wednesday, April 8, 12:38 P.M.

There’s a bunch of free tables back against the far wall,” Michael said, nodding his head in the general direction. He and Lynn had just met up in the cafeteria after she had texted him to meet there. She had just come from parking Carl’s Cherokee in the garage. He had come from the ophthalmology clinic. Once again he could tell she was juiced about something.

“I see it,” Lynn said. “Let’s take it! We’ll have some privacy.” She was carrying a large manila folder under her arm while holding on to her cafeteria tray with both hands. The cafeteria was in full swing with the usual lunchtime crowd. Just getting through the cafeteria line had taken almost a quarter of an hour. Surrounded by people, some of whom they knew, they hadn’t talked about anything serious. Lynn had had to bite her tongue to keep from telling him what she had done.

Just as Michael and Lynn were sitting down, Ronald Metzner appeared out of nowhere, having spied them from the checkout. “Hey, guys,” he said, sliding his tray onto the table. It was a four-top. “You are both in luck. Wait until you hear the joke of the day. Did you ever hear the one about...?”

“Ronald,” Lynn said, interrupting. “I know this is going to come as a surprise to you, but maybe later for the joke. Michael and I have something private to discuss. Would you mind?”

“It’s a quickie,” Ronald said, almost pleading. “It’s really funny.”

“Please,” Lynn persisted.

“Okay, okay,” Ronald said. He hoisted his tray back up and scanned the room for a more receptive audience. “Catch you later,” he added, and walked off.

“I hated doing that,” Lynn confessed, watching Ronald head to the sitting area outside. “There is something forlorn about Ron.”

“I know what you’re saying,” Michael offered.

“Anyway, I want to show you what I got.” Lynn slipped the copies of the building plans out of the folder. They had been reduced to standard paper size, eight and a half by eleven inches. “I went down to the Charleston Building Commission to see if I could find plans of the Shapiro. I hit pay dirt.”

Michael took the sheaf of printouts, which was stapled in the upper left-hand corner. He glanced at the first page. “My God, you need a damn magnifying glass.”

“It’s small but legible,” Lynn said. “You have to hold it close. They couldn’t copy them without reducing them.”

Michael did as Lynn suggested. “Okay, what am I looking at?”

“The first six pages are the floor plans of the Shapiro. From the outside the building looks like it’s a bit more than two stories tall, but actually it is six, with four floors under grade. The floor you went in on and the one connected to the hospital is actually the fifth floor.”

“That’s odd. I wonder why.”

“I guess the designers felt the inmates wouldn’t be interested in a view,” Lynn said, making a stab at humor. “I suppose from the standpoint of heating and cooling, it is a lot more efficient. Maybe they also didn’t want the institute to stand out too much. I mean, it looks big enough the way it is, especially with so few windows, but no one can imagine how big it really is.”

“There’s more than six pages here,” Michael said, leafing through the entire collection before going back to the first page for a closer look.

“There are twelve pages,” Lynn explained. “The last six are the HVAC plans.”

“HVAC plans?” Michael asked with a crooked smile and an exaggerated quizzical expression. “Now, that’s going to come in handy.”

“Don’t be a wiseass,” Lynn snapped. She snatched the plans out of Michael’s grasp and put them down on the table. “You can be as sarcastic as you like, but mark my words: this little treasure trove is going to be a big help when we get in there.”

“If we get in there,” Michael corrected. “There’s still the hurdle of the thumbprint touchscreen.”

“I’m going to work on it right after lunch.”

“The hell you will!” Michael said. “You were assigned patients today in the ophthalmology clinic. I had to see mine and yours this morning. I’m not going to cover for you this afternoon in dermatology. I hate dermatology. We’re lucky you weren’t missed this morning.”

“Okay,” Lynn said soothingly. “We can talk about it.”

“Bullshit!” Michael said. “We decided you’re going back to being a medical student. That means coming to the lectures and the clinic. You know what I’m saying?”

“Okay! All right,” Lynn said. She put her hand on Michael’s forearm to calm him down. “Don’t get so bent out of shape.”

“I won’t get so bent out of shape if you hold up your end of the bargain. We have a lot of powerful people who are on our case.”

“Okay, okay, enough already,” Lynn said. She motioned back at the floor plans and pointed out the two relatively large rooms labeled CLUSTER A and CLUSTER B. “That’s where I think the patients are kept on each floor.”

“How do you figure?”

“You told me that on Ashanti’s Shapiro electronic medical record it said Cluster 4-B 32. I think it’s her in-house address, seeing the size of those rooms. I think she’s on the fourth floor, in Cluster B, bed thirty-two.”

“Maybe so,” Michael said. He picked up the plans again, holding them up almost against his nose. He was studying the first floor plan.

“Do you notice the huge room in the center that is labeled recreation?”

“It’s hard to miss, even at this scale. What the hell is it? There’s nobody getting recreation in the Shapiro Institute.”

“The clerk in the building department and I were trying to figure that out.”

“Is it on every floor?

“No, only on two floors, one and four, but the ceilings are three stories tall. The clerk thought they might be gyms for the staff. He said that they were about the right size for a men’s and a women’s basketball court.” Lynn gave a short, glum laugh. “He wasn’t being serious. Whatever they are, we’re going to have to check them out.”

Michael nodded in agreement. “Can we eat now? I’m famished.”

For a few minutes they ate in silence. Lynn was hungry, too, but after wolfing down her sandwich she said, “When I came out of the Charleston Building Commission I realized I was in the neighborhood of Carl’s father’s law firm. I decided to drop in and see if he was available.”

Michael put down his sandwich and stared at Lynn in disbelief. “Did you see him?”

“For a few minutes. He was off to a business lunch, which was good, so there was no trouble breaking it off.”

“What the fuck did you say? You do know we could be in a shitload of trouble for not reporting the break-in at Carl’s house and messing with the evidence.”

“I know, I know,” Lynn repeated. “I’m not an idiot. I told him that you and I had gone down to Carl’s house around midnight to feed the cat, and we found the cat was nowhere to be found and the front door was worse for wear but that nothing else was missing except the cat. That’s all I said. Well, I also let him know I have been using Carl’s car. I thought he should know about the door so he can have it fixed.”

“That’s hardly justification for taking the risk of talking with him and telling him we were there. What if he reports the front door to the police, and the police want to question us? That could be trouble. It could be more than trouble, because we are going to have to lie.”

“I played down the damage to the door, and even suggested it was probably one of Carl’s friends who was worried about the cat and didn’t know I was feeding it. I seriously doubt he’s going to be calling the police. There is too much on his mind, considering Carl’s medical situation.”

“Why take the risk at all?”

“Because there were two other things I seriously wanted to talk to him about. First was about Carl. I wanted to know if anything was said about Carl having an early serum blood protein abnormality.”

“Had they been told?”

“No, it had not been mentioned, which I find strange, since there had been a formal consult by a hematologist to look into it. Obviously it is now part of his EMR. I also wanted to ask if he and his wife were going to visit. I said that if there was any way I could be included, I would like to be.”

“What was the second reason you wanted to talk to him?”

“I wanted to ask him what we should do if we find out that Sidereal Pharmaceuticals is doing unethical drug testing on patients without their knowledge. I didn’t mention anything about the Shapiro Institute, for obvious reasons, or about the anesthesia looping and all that. But I thought he would be the best person to ask this general question since he had been a district attorney in his early career and is well connected with law enforcement above and beyond the local police. I thought he would know what we would need to do. If we find out something significant by going into the Shapiro, we might not have a lot of time to sit around on our asses deciding what to do. If this is the kind of conspiracy we think it might be, they probably have a lot of contingency plans in place if a couple of gadflies like us get in the way.”

“I wish you had asked me first what I thought about talking to him. I think it was premature and taking a risk, especially after last night.”

“Okay, sorry. I was in the area, and I thought we should be prepared.”

“I believe you,” Michael said. “But we’re in this together. Keep that in mind. So what did he say?”

“He said if we found something serious to come to him! Since Sidereal is a multinational company based in Geneva and doing business in all fifty states, he’d feel comfortable going to both the FBI and the CIA.”

42.

Wednesday, April 8, 11:38 P.M.

What’s your take?” Lynn asked Michael. They were sitting on the same, semi-secluded park bench in the inner courtyard garden where they’d sat the previous afternoon, when Lynn bawled her eyes out after learning that Carl was going to be transferred. On this occasion, it was in deep shadows, thanks to being boxed in by trees and shrubbery. There were Victorian-style street lamps placed at wide intervals along the walkway from the hospital to the dorm, but none close enough to shed much light on the bench. From where they were sitting, they could see the door into the Shapiro Institute that Vladimir had used when he had taken Michael on his brief visit.

Michael checked the time, using his phone. Its illumination briefly lighted his face before he quickly turned it off. “We’ve been here now for more than forty-five minutes,” he said. “I think that’s it. I don’t think we are going to see any more people coming out or going in.”

“That wasn’t much of a shift change,” Lynn said. Just before eleven P.M. they had seen six people go in. A quarter of an hour later six people came out. All were wearing the Shapiro coveralls. They could hear conversation, but not individual words. They couldn’t even tell if they were speaking English.

“I’m shocked there weren’t more people,” Michael agreed.

“I wonder if some of the Shapiro staff come and go via the connection to the main hospital,” Lynn said. “It’s hard to believe that there are only six people working during the evening and the night shifts. That would mean only one person per floor.”

“Some must use the hospital,” Michael said. “There’s no way six people could take care of all the vegetative patients, even with automation. That’s absurd.”

“Absurd or not, it can’t be good care. It is all the more reason I hate the idea of Carl being put in there, above and beyond the possibility he’s being used as a guinea pig for clinical drug trials.”

“The only good aspect is that if there are only six people on the night shift, we might actually get away with going in there. If I had to guess, with only one person per floor, that one person is probably minding the automation and not concerned about possible intruders. So if you are still committed to giving it a try, this is the time.”

“You’re not getting cold feet, are you?” Lynn asked.

“No more than I’ve had from day one. Let’s go get our stuff and get it over with.”

They stood up and stretched. They had been sitting there now for almost an hour. Both briefly eyed the Shapiro as they joined the main paved pathway. The dark, massive building was, if anything, more intimidating at night. It could have been a tomb or mausoleum. What they didn’t see was that another figure had emerged from the shadows and followed them at a significant distance as they headed back to the dorm.

The afternoon had been difficult, almost painful, for Lynn. If she thought the ophthalmology lecture was humdrum, then the dermatology talk was worse. Yet she persevered. At one point she thought seriously about bagging it, but Michael had somehow sensed it and whispered, “Don’t even think about it!” So she had stuck it out. Same with the clinic after the lecture.

Later that evening, at dinner, Lynn and Michael had made it a point to eat with a group of friends as a way of pretending they were acting normally. At the table Lynn had voiced her negative reaction to both ophthalmology and dermatology. A few people, Michael included, felt as she did. Others had different ideas. Two of their dinner partners mentioned they were soon heading off to dermatology residencies, so Lynn didn’t belabor the point.

After dinner, Lynn and Michael had excused themselves and headed back to the dorm. There they had spent more than three hours following the instructions Lynn had downloaded from the Internet for fooling fingerprint scanners in general, and thumbprint scanners in particular. Lynn had already gotten the necessary gear, which included a high-resolution digital camera, which she had borrowed, super glue, wood glue, a good laser printer, and transparency film.

They had experimented by making mock-ups of their own prints and using Michael’s HP laptop, which had a fingerprint lock, to see if they would work. It had taken several attempts, but eventually they did work. The step that they had found the most difficult was going from the negative toner print on the transparency sheet to the positive made from the wood glue. But they had kept at it until they thought they had perfected the step. Finally, feeling relatively confident, they had tackled Vladimir’s prints and made a number of copies.

When they had finished, they debated whether to walk over right away and see if the fake thumbprints would open the Shapiro door, but they decided against it, as the chances of being seen were too great. Instead, they would try to go into the Shapiro after the shift change at eleven o’clock, when they reasoned there would be fewer people out and about in the medical center quadrangle.

Now, as midnight was approaching, both Lynn and Michael were feeling progressively keyed up as they boarded the dorm elevator to go up to Lynn’s room to get the paraphernalia they needed for the break-in. Unfortunately, just as the elevator door was about to close, several fellow students who’d come back from studying in the library got on. Reluctant to talk in the presence of others, Lynn and Michael bit their tongues and stayed silent. Once they got to their floor and found themselves alone again, the floodgates opened, and they excitedly went over the general plan they had agreed on if and when they got into the institute.

The first order of business was to go directly to the NOC and try to access the Shapiro data bank and learn what they could, including finding out Carl’s location. Then they would visit the appropriate cluster room. After that, they planned to check out the supposed recreation space on either the first floor or the fourth, whichever was more convenient, since those floors had the only access.

“My sense is that we should make this visit as short as possible,” Michael said as they approached Lynn’s room, where they had left their gear. “We have to be fast. No foot-dragging! The longer we’re in there, the greater the risk. You know what I am saying?”

“Of course,” Lynn said. “It stands to reason, but I am determined to get what we need from the Shapiro computer with Vladimir’s log-in. It might take a few minutes, and I don’t want you to be ragging on me. We need to find out how many deaths the Shapiro has had, and the cause, since it opened. We also want to know how many people have recovered enough to be discharged. It’s important, since I know from my reading what the stats should be.”

“And we want to find out Carl’s location,” Michael added.

“Obviously,” Lynn said. “That’s going to determine which cluster room we go to. Will you want to try to visit Ashanti?”

“Not necessarily,” Michael said.

Lynn keyed open her door and entered. Michael followed, closing the door behind.

“Okay, I think it’s time we dressed for the occasion,” Lynn said, adding a touch of humor to temper her growing anxiety. Her intuition told her they were going to find something disturbing if they managed to get in, but it also reminded her that if they were caught, there was going to be hell to pay. She didn’t agree with Michael’s hope that they might only get a slap on the wrist because of their medical-student status.

Without further discussion they quickly changed out of their clothes and got into the white one-piece Shapiro coveralls Vladimir had provided. When they were finished, they looked at each other. Lynn was the first to laugh but Michael quickly joined in.

“Yours is way too small,” Lynn said. “Sorry to laugh.”

“Yours is way too big,” Michael said. “Rest assured: no one is going to accuse us of being dipped.”

“Surely not,” Lynn said. She knew that in Michael’s vernacular “dipped” meant “dressed up.” Both pocketed their mobile phones, each with a flashlight app and fully charged. Lynn checked the time. It was just after midnight. “It’s just about the time we thought appropriate.”

“Okay,” Michael said. “Let’s go kick butt!”

Over their distinctive scrubs they both pulled on long raincoats. They didn’t want any fellow students who might see them asking any questions about their outfits. Both picked up an envelope containing one of the fake thumbprints. Lynn put the stapled floor plans into a pocket — the one-piece Shapiro coveralls had an abundance of them.

They were almost out the door when Lynn remembered something else. “Hang on a second!” she said. A moment later she was back, brandishing a screwdriver.

“Why a screwdriver?” Michael questioned.

“You’ll probably make fun of me if I tell you,” Lynn said. She pulled her door closed and made sure it was locked. Usually she didn’t care, but with someone else’s high-resolution digital camera on her desk, she didn’t want anyone going in.

They headed toward the elevators. “You’re not going to clue me in about the screwdriver?”

“No,” Lynn said. “I know you too well. I’ll tell you later when we come back here to the dorm.”

“Suit yourself,” Michael said.

They rode down by themselves.

“I’m getting a bit nervous, bro,” Lynn admitted.

“You’re not alone, sis,” Michael said.

A few students were on the first floor, patronizing the vending machines and conversing in small groups. Lynn and Michael ignored them and went outside. It was not uncommon for third- and fourth-year medical students to leave the dorm at that hour, often being called over to the hospital, and no one questioned them. In the relative darkness they headed into the medical center quadrangle, following the serpentine walkway leading to the clinic building and the main hospital beyond. Very few stars were visible because of the light issuing mostly from the medical center windows. To the left, the Shapiro Institute loomed out of the darkness.

Walking quickly in and out of puddles of light cast downward by the Victorian street lamps, they approached the turnoff for the Shapiro about midway between the dorm and the clinic building. It was on their left. Opposite it, to the right, a short stretch of walkway branched off toward the bench where they had recently been sitting to watch the shift change. They couldn’t see the bench itself as it was completely lost in shadow.

The students stopped and paused, first looking ahead and then behind. Both were disappointed to see a figure coming in their direction, seemingly from the dorm. A moment later the individual entered the cone of light from one of the lamps. They could tell it was a uniformed member of the security staff.

“What should we do?” Lynn asked with moderate alarm. They didn’t want to draw attention, which they might by standing there.

Michael pointed to the right. “Let’s return to our bench. We’ll let him pass. Maybe he’ll think we’ve come here to make out!”

Lynn had to smile in spite of herself.

It took them only twenty seconds to get to the bench. They sat down. Surrounded on both sides with shrubbery, they couldn’t see the security man initially, but in less than a minute he appeared and stopped for a moment, looking in their direction.

“He might be able to see us,” Lynn whispered. “Kiss me! Make it look real!”

Michael obliged, wrapping his big arms around Lynn’s relatively narrow shoulders. It was a sustained kiss. Both closed their eyes.

After almost a full minute, they hazarded a look back toward the main pathway. The security man was gone. They detached themselves from their embrace.

“It worked,” Michael whispered.

“Such sacrifice!” Lynn teased.

“Let’s promise never to do that again,” Michael teased back, “but it must have been convincing, since he decided not to mess with us.”

Lynn nodded but didn’t respond audibly. Her attention had been absorbed by the Shapiro building silhouetted against the black sky. Its intimidating appearance was causing her to struggle with her intuition, which was now telling her a different story than it had back in the safety of her room. Now it was saying they shouldn’t go in. But that was not the only inner voice clamoring for attention. At the very same time another part of her brain was screaming at her that she had to check on Carl; she had to find out once and for all how he was being treated and if he was being used as an experimental subject. It was an ambivalence-fueled mental tug-of-war.

“All right!” Michael said excitedly, unaware of Lynn’s sudden indecision. “Let’s do this quick, fast, and in a hurry.” He leaped to his feet but noticed Lynn wasn’t moving. “What’s up, girl? You ready to step up or what?”

Lynn stood. Her hesitancy eased in the face of Michael’s eagerness. “I’m ready, I think.”

“Let’s do it!” Michael said. He moved quickly. Lynn had to almost run to catch up. When they got to the door, Michael popped up the protective cover for the thumbprint security pad with the Russian’s fake fingerprint already positioned on his thumb. He pressed it against the touchscreen, but nothing happened. “Fuck,” he said. “It’s not working.”

“Let me try mine,” Lynn said. She and Michael rapidly changed places. She put her fake fingerprint on her finger and pressed it against the pad. Again nothing!

“Mothafucka!” Michael blurted. Anxiously he glanced back along the walkway, fearing they might be observed while hesitating at the door. From the walkway they were in plain sight.

“Wait!” Lynn said. “I remember reading that sometimes you have to heat it up.” She opened her mouth widely and thrust her thumb in, being careful not to touch the layer of pliable, almost rubbery wood glue to her teeth or tongue. She exhaled through her mouth, taking several breaths. Then she tried pressing it against the touch pad again.

There was an audible click. She pushed on the heavy, solid door with her shoulder, and it opened.

“Hallelujah!” Michael exclaimed.

A moment later both students were inside, blinking against the brightness of the whiter-than-white hallway, evenly illuminated by LED light coming through the translucent ceiling. Lynn lost no time pulling the door closed. There was another audible click as the release lever fell into place. At that moment both pulled on Shapiro hats and masks.

Looking up, Michael saw, attached to the ceiling about twenty feet down the hall, what he had thought was a video device when he had visited the Shapiro Institute the first time. He pointed it out to Lynn, then whispered, “Best if we ditch the raincoats!”

After he and Lynn got their overcoats off, he balled them up into the tightest bundle possible and stashed them in the far corner by the door.

Lynn was already looking at the floor plan for fifth level.

“No need for a map,” Michael said. “The NOC is straight ahead on the right. Let’s move it!”

“There’s a locker room on the left,” Lynn said, still studying the floor plan as they started forward. “Maybe we should leave the raincoats in there, instead of out here in the hall.”

“My vote is we leave them be. There’s too big a risk of running into staff in the locker room, where we’d probably end up having to have a conversation, which would mean we’d get exposed as party crashers before we started. We can only expect to get so many miles out of these Shapiro suits.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Lynn said. She looked up at the video device as they passed under it, wondering if they were already under observation. She hoped not, as it would mean their visit would be a short one.

Walking quickly, they approached the pocket door leading into the NOC.

43.

Thursday, April 9, 12:22 A.M.

Misha Zotov was notorious for being a deep sleeper, especially after getting very little sleep the night before, and his cell phone’s selected ring tone was almost too melodious to pull him out of Morpheus’s grasp. To make things worse, he had passed the evening imbibing considerably more vodka than usual. Over-drinking was his method of dealing with stress, which he was experiencing more than usual thanks to the series of threats to the biologics program. Up until a few weeks ago, there had been nary a blip. Unfortunately that had changed dramatically, particularly over the last week or so. The last, and possibly worst, was due to Darko’s screwup with the two medical students.

After the fourth ring, Misha was conscious enough to recognize the sound. With great effort he reached for the phone on his bedside table. As he did so, he looked at the clock and cursed loudly. Blinking madly to focus, he checked to see who was calling. When he saw it was Darko Lebedev, he started cursing anew.

Misha slapped the phone to his ear and flopped back onto his pillow. “This better be good,” he growled in Russian.

“It’s good,” Darko said, sounding strangely upbeat. “Very unexpected but good: the medical students have taken care of themselves.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Timur and I have been keeping them under observation since you and I talked this afternoon. At first they seemed to be acting normally and apparently did not tell anyone about my visit last night. But then this evening they went out into the hospital garden around ten-thirty and sat for an hour in the dark on a secluded bench that had a view of the door to Shapiro Institute.”

“You think they were observing it?”

“That was our impression, because it was during the shift change.”

“So how is this taking care of themselves?”

“It gets better. After they left their observation spot, we thought we were done for the night. Then, to our surprise, Timur called me to come back because they reappeared a bit later, dressed in raincoats. They then went back outside to the same bench and after making out for a while, they went over to the Shapiro door. We had no idea what they were planning. To our shock, they opened the door and went inside!”

Misha sat up suddenly, pulling the covers off his companion for the night. “How the fuck did they open the door?”

“We don’t know. Apparently they fooled the thumbprint scanner, which isn’t all that difficult.”

“This is terrific,” Misha said. “It’s like having fish jump into the boat.”

“I thought you would be pleased.”

“Listen! Call whoever is heading up security tonight. Tell them that I have authorized a lockdown for the Shapiro until further notice. Have them electronically seal the external door and even the door through the visiting area to the hospital.”

“I already did,” Darko said. “The Shapiro is in total lockdown, which includes all communication with the outside world except for the hotline from control center. Do you want Leonid and me to go in and take care of them?”

“No!” Misha said. He bounded out of bed. “I’ll get in touch with Fyodor. We’ll consult with Dr. Rhodes and Dr. Erikson. We should figure out a way to add these pests to the inventory.”

“Let me know if you change your mind after talking with Fyodor,” Darko said. “Leonid and I will be happy to do whatever is necessary.”

“Will do,” Misha said. “Good job!”

Misha disconnected from Darko and pulled up Fyodor’s number in his contacts. A few seconds later, he could hear the phone ringing. He knew Fyodor was going to be a bear upon awakening, but he also knew he would be pleased with what he had to tell him.

44.

Thursday, April 9, 12:33 A.M.

Lynn glanced up at Michael, who was looking at the monitor screen over her shoulder. They were in the Shapiro NOC, which they had found empty, as they had expected, going by Vladimir’s comments. Lynn was sitting at one of the terminals. She had quickly logged in to the Shapiro network without difficulty, using Vladimir’s user name and password, and, once connected, had first typed in Carl’s name. What had popped up was his home page, which Michael said looked the same as Ashanti’s, even with the same apparent location: Cluster 4-B, but with a different number. Carl’s was 64, whereas Ashanti’s was 32. What also was different was that it didn’t say DROZITUMAB +4 ACTIVE but rather ASELIZUMAB PRELIMINARY.

“What do you think?” Lynn asked.

“I think it is convenient they are both in Cluster 4-B and the number must be their bed like you suggested. We can check them both.”

“I’m asking about the ‘aselizumab’ reference.”

“I guess he is going to be given aselizumab, whatever the hell that is.”

“We’ll have to look it up later,” Lynn said hurriedly. “At least we know from the ‘ab’ at its end that it is a biologic drug.” Exiting the window, she then queried how many deaths the Shapiro Institute had logged since its doors opened in 2007. The answer flashed on the screen: 31.

“That’s incredible,” Lynn said. “Do you believe that’s true?”

“The system has serious restricted access. Why wouldn’t it be true?”

“Hell, if it is a true stat, they must be doing something right,” Lynn said. She was impressed, even a bit relieved. “Two years ago, when we visited there had already been twenty-two deaths in six years, but they had a low census, a fraction of the potential capacity. They must be full now and have had only nine deaths in two years. That’s phenomenal.”

“Find out the current census!” Michael suggested.

Lynn turned back to the screen and typed in the question. The answer came back instantly: 931 patients out of possible 1200. “There you go,” she said. “They have almost a thousand patients! And if they lose less than five patients a year, that is an incredible statistic. In my research Monday night, I found out that the mortality for people in a vegetative state is ten percent up to as much as forty percent per year. Here they are managing less than one percent, if I’m doing the math right.”

“You’re doing the math right,” Michael assured her. “In fact it is less than half of one percent. I’d say it’s a damn good advertisement for automation, which is what they had told us was key.”

“Like I said, they have to be doing something right. It’s even more impressive if they are using their patients for drug testing.”

“What did you say you found was the major cause of death in coma patients?”

“Pneumonia and other infections often stemming from bedsores. It is because the patients are so immobile.”

“Maybe keeping visitation to a minimum really works. It’s like reverse precautions for immune-compromised people.”

Lynn nodded. Michael had a good point, even though the visitation policy bothered her from a personal perspective because of Carl. “Let’s look at the other side of the coin,” she said, “and check how many people recovered enough to be discharged. Remember, trauma is a major cause of coma and around ten percent of them recover enough to go home.”

Suddenly Michael straightened up. He looked back toward the hallway.

“What’s the matter?” Lynn asked nervously. As focused as she was on what she was doing, she had forgotten where they were.

“I thought I heard something,” Michael said.

For a few moments both students listened intently, holding their breaths. All they could hear was the hum of the powerful ventilation system.

“I don’t hear anything suspicious,” Lynn said.

“Nor do I,” Michael agreed. “Okay, my mind must be playing tricks.” Nervously he glanced at his watch. “I’m thinking it’s best if we get our asses out of here. Someone someplace is going to be aware that these stats are being accessed by someone in the middle of the fucking night. What we are doing here is legally more serious than our coming into this place.”

“I’m with you,” Lynn said. “I know! But this is important. Just a few minutes more.” She went back to the keypad and quickly asked for the number of people discharged since the Shapiro had been in operation. The answer was as surprising as the death rate: none!

Lynn looked back up at Michael. She was taken aback. “I’m not sure which is more incredible: the low death rate or the lack of any discharges.”

“Well, maybe they don’t take trauma patients.”

“I can’t believe that. As I said, trauma is a major cause of persistent vegetative state and coma.” Lynn laughed even though she didn’t find anything funny. “They are doing a bang-up job with survival but have a piss-poor cure rate.”

“Okay, let’s go,” Michael said. He tried to pull Lynn’s chair back from the terminal.

Lynn resisted. “Just one more thing,” she said. “Let’s see what the cause of death was for the thirty-one patients. I’d guess pneumonia will top the list.” Quickly Lynn typed in the query, and when the answer came back, she was as shocked as she had been when she found out there had been no discharges. Almost half the deaths were from multiple myeloma!

Throwing up her hands, Lynn said, “This can’t be true. No way!”

“It’s big-time weird,” Michael agreed, but at the moment he had other things on his mind even if she didn’t. With a bit more force he succeeded in pulling her chair back. “Enough data surfing if you want to try to visit Cluster 4-B and the recreation space, like we planned!” Without waiting for a response, he went to the door and opened it. When he was sure the coast was clear he said, “All right, let’s go, girl! Get your ass in gear!”

Lynn followed him out into the hallway. She looked stunned. “Those numbers are crazy! How can the Shapiro have a death rate from multiple myeloma that is one hundred times what’s seen in the general population?”

“Let’s hold off this conversation until we get out of here,” Michael snapped as he got the NOC door to close. It was a pocket door operated by a touch pad in the wall at chest height. “Come on! Let’s get to the stairway.”

For the rest of the way down to the stairwell door, Lynn held her tongue, but her mind was roiling. As soon as the stairwell door closed behind them, she stopped and said, “I’m sorry, but there is something truly weird about multiple myeloma and this institute.”

“Listen!” Michael said with exasperation. “Let’s get this visit over with before we launch into a lengthy discussion about what it all means. You seem to be forgetting we’re on borrowed time in hostile territory.” He undid his mask for a moment to wipe the perspiration off his face. It was warm and humid in the stairwell.

“Okay, you’re right,” Lynn said. “But I wish I’d had tried to see if there is any data on the incidence of gammopathy in here. Maybe on our way out, we can stop back in the NOC. It would only take a couple of minutes.”

“We’ll keep it in mind,” Michael said, replacing his mask. “Provided, of course, we are not being chased.”

“Don’t joke about such a thing,” Lynn said.

“I’m not joking,” Michael said.

As they descended the stairs down to level four, Lynn consulted the floor plan. When they reached the landing, they paused outside the door and she showed him that there were several ways for them to get to Cluster 4-B.

“Let’s stay as far away as we can from the room labeled ‘automation control.’ My sense is that is where the staff will be holed up.”

“Good point,” Lynn said. “That means we should go left out of the stairwell and follow the hallway to the end and then turn right. I hope the doors are labeled. If they are not, it will be the fourth door on the right after the turn.”

Michael cracked the door onto the fourth floor and listened. Except for the omnipresent sound of the HVAC, silence reigned. He opened the door just enough to look up and down the hallway. It was a mirror image of the hallway above on five and just as white and brightly illuminated. Most important, it was similarly without a soul in sight. The only difference was that, at its far end, it lacked a door to the exterior. “Let’s not make this our life’s work, you know what I’m saying?”

Lynn knew exactly what Michael meant. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said.

It wasn’t a mad dash, but they moved as quickly and silently as they could, passing under a number of what they guessed were ceiling-mounted video cameras. The doors that they passed were labeled, for the most part. They turned the corner and resumed their speed. They hadn’t needed to count. Cluster 4-B was clearly labeled on the door in black sans serif letters and numerals.

“You ready?” Michael questioned.

“As ready as I ever will be,” Lynn responded, bracing herself. Seeing Carl in this sterile, deserted place was going to be an emotional challenge.

45.

Thursday, April 9, 12:48 A.M.

The door to Cluster 4-B was a pocket door, like the one to the NOC, only stouter. And like the door to the NOC, it was operated electronically, with a lever to the right of the frame. Michael pressed it and the door started to slide open.

Before they could see inside the room, they heard the intermittent whining of electrical motors and the clanking of heavy machinery. The noise had been completely muffled by the sound-insulated door and the walls. As the door opened all the way, Lynn and Michael were treated to a view of what looked like a completely mechanized, highly complex assembly line in an automobile plant, with robotic arms, and a forklift-like apparatus with oversize rubber tires connected to a constantly moving conveyor system. No staff was in attendance.

With some trepidation they entered, and the door automatically closed behind them. It was a large rectangular room about the size of a small theater, with a very high ceiling. The level of sound was so loud that they practically had to yell to hear each other. The air was warm and humid.

“Can you fucking believe this?” Michael half shouted.

“It’s like a futuristic horror movie,” Lynn yelled. She was taken aback, unsure if she truly wanted to see what was in front of her. “This is automated patient care taken to the nth degree.”

“And there are eleven other rooms just like it,” Michael said in awe.

The entire right side of the room was composed of a hundred angled but mostly horizontal Plexiglas cylinders in twenty-five vertical stacks of four. Each cylinder in each stack was about four feet in diameter and seven feet deep, separated from other ones on either side by a three-foot-wide metal grate. These grates formed a scaffold as a means of access for service, and could be reached by metal ladders that were attached. The opening to the lowest cylinder was waist high and the highest was near the ceiling. Each cylinder was numbered and had a computer monitor on an adjustable arm.

As Lynn and Michael stared in horror, they could now appreciate that about half the cylinders contained a patient, each naked save for the headgear resembling a football helmet that they remembered the mannequin wearing during their second-year introductory visit.

Suddenly, through an opening high up, on the left side of the room, a supine, naked, comatose patient entered the room moving quickly on the conveyor system. He, too, had a helmet. In a manner that reminded Lynn and Michael of a modern baggage-handling system at a major airport, the patient was rapidly transported to a specific area of the room not too far away from where they were standing. With some additional clanking and grinding noises the entire conveyor system adjusted to bring the patient just outside the proper cylinder, which was the top container in the sixth row. There, the robotic arms went to work to make all the appropriate connections for the feeding tube and other embedded lines. Once all the connections were set up, which happened surprisingly quickly, the patient was slid into the cylinder like a rocket being loaded into a launcher.

Before Lynn and Michael could respond to what they had just seen, the conveyor system noisily repositioned itself seven rows away from where it had deposited the first patient, and rapidly extracted a second patient from a different cylinder. Once this second body was completely in the open, the robotic arms went to work disconnecting the various lines. Then, following a reverse route from that of the first, the second patient was zipped out of the room. Everything was accomplished in just a few minutes.

“Good God!” Lynn exclaimed when she could find her voice. “This is obscenely mechanized. There’s no humanity, no dignity! It’s against everything medicine stands for.”

“Where the hell do you suppose the bodies are going?” Michael asked.

“God only knows,” Lynn said. At that point they were treated to a repeat of the sequence, with another body coming back from parts unknown. After that, another body was taken away. The students soon got the impression that what they were witnessing was a constant process, maybe even 24/7, of bodies coming and going.

Being careful to steer clear of the huge and very active business end of the conveyor system that unpredictably moved back and forth on its oversize tires and up and down in front of the cylinders, the two students approached the last stack. Despite their horror, they felt a morbid curiosity. The cylinder at waist level was numbered 100. The one immediately above it was 99. Approaching the mouth of the hundredth cylinder, they looked inside. The patient was female, lying on a series of moving rollers to keep pressure off any given spot. While they were watching, a sprinkler system was suddenly activated inside the cylinder, rinsing and disinfecting the woman. A sucking sound came from the base of the cylinder as the fluid was drawn off. From their vantage point, they could appreciate that the container was angled down at an incline of something like fifteen degrees.

“It’s like a freaking car wash,” Michael commented with a mixture of disgust and admiration. “Somebody’s put some real thought into all this.”

“I suppose that’s why their survival rate is so good.”

The monitor to the side of the cylinder showed the patient’s home page, which included her name, Gloria Parkman; her age, thirty-two; her location, Cluster 4-B 100; RANIBIZUMAB 3+ ACTIVE; and a long list of real-time vital signs and other extensive monitoring data. The monitoring was so extensive that the students intuitively understood that the patient had to have sensor chips implanted to make it possible. There were even real-time electroencephalogram tracings.

“Hey, I just remembered something,” Michael said. “Ranibizumab was in the ophthalmology lecture yesterday. It’s used for macular degeneration and is well tolerated without allergic problems.”

“If it is already an established drug, I wonder why they are giving it to her?”

“Good question,” Michael said. “Maybe there are still some allergic issues that the lecturer didn’t mention. But one way or the other, I’m beginning to think coming here might raise more questions than give answers.” Ducking his head, he moved down alongside the cylinder, between the cylinder and the wall. He was impressed by the constantly moving roller system that kept the patient’s body in motion while avoiding pressure point problems. It was a kind of massage system in a tube that encouraged circulation and protected the integrity of the skin.

“Hey!” Michael yelled to Lynn. “Come here! Look at this!” Lynn was still captivated by the monitor. She was marveling at the range of physiological data that was being followed in real time and possibly continuously run through a supercomputer.

Lynn squeezed in beside Michael. In the restricted space, the noise coming from the machinery in the room seemed even louder. Lynn tried to follow Michael’s line of sight and pointing finger. She was as impressed as he was with the roller system. “What am I supposed to be looking at?” she yelled.

“The catheter embedded in the abdomen! What do you think that could be for?”

“No idea. Do you?”

“No! But it looks to me like the abdomen is a bit distended. What’s your take?”

“Now that you mention it, it does look a bit bloated. You think they are running fluid into the abdomen? That’s not unheard of. The peritoneal cavity has quite a surface area and can even be used for dialysis.”

“True! Maybe she’s got a kidney problem. Let’s go back and look at the monitor and see if the kidney function is normal.”

Lynn backed out of the confined space first, followed by Michael. When they looked at the monitor, they could see that the kidney function was perfectly normal, including urine output. Then something from the long list of things under observation caught Lynn’s attention. She pointed to it. “This is strange. One of the stats gives her output of ascites fluid. They’re not putting anything into her abdomen with that catheter, they’re taking fluid out.”

“And she’s putting out a significant amount,” Michael said, looking at the same recording as Lynn. “The main cause of ascites is liver disease, yet her liver function is normal. Weird!”

“The second major cause of ascites is low blood protein, but hers is raised. Double weird.”

“Uh-oh!” Michael shouted. “Quick! Duck back into the cubbyhole!”

The massive conveyor system, with its oversize tires, suddenly came in their direction, its weight making the floor tremble and momentarily trapping them in alongside cylinder 100. In the adjacent stack, a body was extracted, robotically disconnected from its various lines, and whisked out of the room. Then the conveyor system trundled away for its next assignment.

A moment later, when they emerged from their shelter, Lynn surprised Michael by climbing the ladder to peer into several of the upper cylinders.

“I think we better move on,” Michael yelled up to her impatiently. “We are pushing our luck. With all this mechanical activity in here and bodies coming and going, somebody’s got to be minding this place with video surveillance.”

“I just wanted to check to see if any other patients have an intra-abdominal catheter,” Lynn said, already climbing back down. “And they all do in this stack.”

Michael stepped over to the next stack and peered in at the patient in the lower cylinder. “You’re right. Seems they all have it.”

“That’s got to mean something, but what?”

“Good question,” Michael said, “but we’ve got to break out, girl.”

“I’m not leaving until I see Carl,” Lynn said with a tone that brooked no argument.

“My personal opinion would be to let it go,” Michael said, placing his hand on her shoulder in hopes of restraining her. “Seeing Carl here is not going to help you or him. You know what I’m saying.”

“I don’t care,” Lynn said. She shrugged off Michael’s hand and started down the line of cylinders.

For a moment Michael hesitated, wondering if it was best that she go by herself for a bit of privacy with her stricken lover. But he quickly decided otherwise. It was hardly the proper environment for any attempt at intimacy, and he didn’t want to risk her getting emotional, which he thought was a significant possibility, knowing how he would feel if the situation were reversed and his girlfriend, Kianna, was one of the patients. He quickly caught up with her. As he did so, the forklift-like mechanism that pulled the patients in and out of the cylinders suddenly came in their direction.

The students had to flee back to the walkway that ran the length of the room against the wall opposite the bank of cylinders. The conveyor track taking the patients in and out of the room arched overhead.

After a patient was deposited in a cylinder close to where Lynn and Michael had been, the whole apparatus began moving to the opposite end of the room to pick up another.

“For the life of me, I can’t imagine why they are constantly moving these patients,” Michael yelled, going up on his tiptoes to try to get a peek into the black hole into which the conveyor track disappeared. “Or where the hell they are going.” When he turned back to Lynn, he saw that she was well on her way to cylinder 64. By the time he caught up to her, he could tell she wasn’t happy.

“He’s not here,” Lynn yelled over the continuous noise.

A quick glance confirmed for Michael that cylinder 64 was empty, although the monitor displayed Carl’s home page, so it was where he had been or was to be.

“Just as well,” Michael yelled back.

“Do you want to see if Ashanti is here?”

“I don’t see any point,” Michael said without hesitation. “For the tenth time, let’s get a move on.”

“All right,” Lynn said, but still she hesitated. She had suggested seeking out Ashanti as a way to stall. Her irrational side wanted to wait for Carl to be returned as part of the continuous stream of patients coming and going on the conveyor system. At the same time, Lynn’s rational side agreed with Michael that they needed to leave. For a moment she struggled with her indecision, and as she did so her eyes caught the various color-coded and labeled lines that would be robotically connected to Carl when he was brought back to monitor him and keep him alive. There was the intravenous line in blue, an arterial line in red, a gastrostomy line for nutrition in green, and an intraperitoneal line in yellow.

Michael grasped Lynn’s upper arm. “I know it’s tough for you to leave, but it isn’t going to be any easier if you see him. We have to go!”

“I know,” Lynn shouted with a degree of resignation. “But look! Carl already has an intraperitoneal line!” She pointed to the yellow connector. “Why? He certainly doesn’t have ascites. Not yet, anyway.”

“We can debrief when we get out of this freaking place. We’ve got a lot to process.”

“You know what I think?” Lynn said with sudden urgency and a renewed degree of horror.

“I don’t, but I can tell you are about to tell me. But tell me out in the hallway, where I can hear you. This racket in here is driving me crazy.”

“All right!” Lynn yelled. The noise in the room was beginning to get to her as well. She let Michael pull her toward the walkway. It was just in time, because the conveyor system suddenly lurched in their direction again. When they reached the walkway, Lynn turned back to make sure the patient that was being brought in was not Carl, as the machine positioned itself in front of Carl’s stack. But the patient went into cylinder 62, not 64.

Quickly, they retreated to the door they had used to enter the room. When it closed behind them, their ears were ringing in the comparative silence. Immediately Lynn blurted out, “I think I know what the hell Sidereal is doing. They’re not experimenting on these patients, like we thought. They are fucking using them in a much more perverse way!”

“Okay, okay,” Michael soothed. “What do you mean?”

“You remember how monoclonal antibody drugs like ranibizumab are made.”

“Sure!” Michael said. He was taken aback by Lynn’s sudden passion. He could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes. “They are made by mice tumors called hybridomas.”

“Which are?”

“What is this, a freaking test? Tell me what you are thinking.”

“Answer my question! What are hybridomas?”

“A kind of cancer made by fusing mouse lymphocytes with mouse multiple myeloma cells and injected back into mice.”

“And where are they injected?”

“Into the abdomen.”

“And why are pharmaceutical companies required to jump through so many hoops to humanize the mouse-generated drugs?”

“To lower the chance of allergic reactions when they are taken by humans.”

Lynn stared at Michael without blinking, waiting for him to connect the dots. It was all there, hanging in the air.

“Mothafuckas!” Michael snapped after a moment when all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in his mind. He shook his head with repugnance.

“It all fits,” Lynn said with equivalent disgust. “All of it. Sidereal Pharmaceuticals and Middleton Healthcare are in bed together. It’s why so many people going into Middleton Healthcare hospitals are getting gammopathies. It’s why their patients have such a sky-high incidence of multiple myeloma. And here in the Shapiro it’s one hundred percent. They must be using all thousand patients to make truly human monoclonal antibody drugs, which don’t have to be humanized. They are already human!”

“And, worse yet, they must be behind these anesthesia-induced comas,” Michael said. “It must be a new method of recruiting healthy bodies they can tap twenty-four/seven. I’m sorry I have to say this, because of Carl.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Lynn said. Her voice reflected both anger and loss. She took a deep breath to stay in control. “Carl’s vegetative state wasn’t an accident. I was afraid as much when I found the looping. Now I know for sure. What I can’t understand is why we didn’t see all this earlier. When I think about it, it’s been staring us in the face.”

“The question now becomes what to do,” Michael said. “Who do we turn to?”

“This is a major conspiracy,” Lynn said. “We can’t go to anybody here in the medical center. There is no way to know who is involved and who isn’t. We’ve got to go to Carl’s father, Markus Vandermeer, and we have to do it tonight. In fact...” Lynn pulled out her cell phone. When she turned it on, she immediately saw there was no service. “Damn! I’ll have to call him as soon as we get outside.”

“Let’s go!”

“Wait! As long as we’re in here, I want to at least glance into the so-called recreation space. That’s sick humor if I ever heard it. There can’t be anything recreational about this place, but my thought is that maybe Carl is there.” Lynn pulled out the floor plans and quickly studied them. “Okay! I see where we have to go. It’s really close, and will only take a minute.”

46.

Thursday, April 9, 1:04 A.M.

Misha had to knock to get the pocket door into the SCC, or Shapiro Central Control, to open. For security reasons, the only way it could be operated was from inside. He gestured for Fyodor and Benton Rhodes to precede him into the highly air-conditioned room. He followed. Five armed security men in hospital security uniforms brought up the rear. All were Russian expatriates and took orders from Fyodor. Fyodor had personally recruited them from Saint Petersburg when he’d taken over the hospital security department. He considered them his shock troops.

The technician manning central control was called Viktor Garin. He was dressed in Shapiro coveralls, in contrast to the newcomers. He remained standing as the others crowded around the bank of forty monitors that were alternately displaying security feeds from all of the hallways and a number of the rooms from all six floors of the Shapiro Institute.

Although part of Viktor’s job was to keep his eye on the security monitors, the vast majority of his time was spent on the other side of the room, in front of the feeds coming from the Shapiro automation equipment. It was with the machinery that most problems occurred. In the eight years he’d worked in the Shapiro, there had never been a security breach. The only infractions had been when several of the Shapiro staff members were caught sleeping.

Despite his being in the company of Benton, Fyodor spoke to Viktor in Russian, asking where the intruders were and what they had been doing.

“At the moment they are on floor four, heading for the recreation room,” Viktor answered in Russian. “So far they have only visited the NOC, where they used a terminal to access the data bank, and then went on to Cluster 4-B, where they spent most of their time. As I said, at the moment they are heading for the recreation room.” He pointed to the monitor that was tracking them in the fourth-floor hallway.

“What kind of data were they looking at in the NOC?” Fyodor asked.

“Mortality and discharge statistics and the file for the new patient.”

Switching to English, Fyodor related to Benton what he had learned, including where Lynn and Michael were headed at the moment.

“They certainly are nosy fucks,” Benton said irritably. “It’s going to be a relief to get rid of them.”

“You have to give them credit for being resourceful,” Fyodor said.

“I’m not inclined to give them credit for anything,” Benton said. “And I certainly don’t like them going in the recreation room. Who knows what potentially infectious agents they could be carrying?”

“As you can see, they’re wearing Shapiro scrubs, hats, and masks,” Fyodor said, pointing to the proper monitor for Benton’s benefit.

“Where did they get them, and how clean are they?” Benton questioned. “It’s going to be a major disaster if these two jerks cause an outbreak in our patient population. As medical students, they are exposed to all sorts of illness. It’s going to be an enormous setback if we lose even one patient producing a truly lucrative drug.”

“We’ll stop them as soon as we can,” Fyodor said. “I think there is a good chance they won’t try to go out onto the floor.”

“We can hope,” Benton said. “The only thing for sure is that they are going to be shocked, and who’s to know what they might do?”

“They’re not going to do anything,” Fyodor said. “They can’t. The whole institute is in full lockdown. They’re not going anywhere and can’t communicate out with their phones.”

“Regardless, let’s take care of them ASAP,” Benton said. “The sooner the better.”

“Agreed,” Fyodor said cheerfully. “Frankly, we have been waiting for you. Did you bring the tranquilizers?”

Benton produced two syringes preloaded with large doses of midazolam.

Fyodor took the syringes. “Can we be sure this will completely tranquilize them?”

“Without doubt,” Benton said with a laugh. “They will be completely zonked out for way longer than what we need to get them over to the OR. For your information, the diagnosis is going to be subdural hematomas. The official cause is going to be head trauma suffered during their unauthorized break-in. Norman Phillips, a neurosurgeon who is friendly to the program, will be surgeon. I’ll be doing the anesthesia to make sure they don’t wake up.”

“Is the surgeon already in the hospital?”

“He’s on his way,” Benton said.

Fyodor turned to his enforcement team and handed the leader the syringes. Speaking in Russian, he told them to get it over with quickly and haul the tranquilized students up to the patient viewing room A. From there they would be helping to transport them one at a time over to the OR when the OR was ready.

47.

Thursday, April 9, 1:11 A.M.

It took Lynn and Michael longer than they had expected to get into the recreation room. The entrance door had been different from all the others. It was as heavy as the door into Cluster 4-B, but instead of operating with a generic touch pad, it had another thumbprint security system like the one on the external door. Similar to their experience with the exterior door, it took several tries. Once again, Lynn had to warm the fake fingerprint by using her breath.

A small green light finally flashed above the touch pad, indicating success, and the door started to slide open. As with the cluster room, the first thing they were aware of was noise issuing forth. It was mechanical again, but not nearly as loud as in the cluster room. As the door opened farther, giving them a view of the interior, both students sucked in a breath and stepped back in shocked surprise.

The room was much larger than the cluster room in all respects, with a ceiling about fifty feet high. The level of illumination from a mixture of LED and ultraviolet recessed ceiling fixtures was intense. Also built into the ceiling was a maze of tracks supporting a number of large grappling hooks, each with long, curved tines. The grappling hooks resembled the claw cranes found in old-fashioned gaming arcades that, for a quarter, allowed players to try to pick up a prize. But here in the Shapiro the claws weren’t picking up prizes but rather ambulating people and dropping others off.

Massed on the floor were hundreds of naked patients, in either a vegetative state or a coma, each wearing his or her helmet and, incredibly enough, walking aimlessly about in a jerky, slightly hesitant, stiff manner, often bumping into each other as well as the walls. Their hands and arms hung limp at their sides.

“My good God!” Lynn cried. “I’m not prepared for this. This is worse than the cluster room. The helmets are not just for sensors.”

“You are so right,” Michael said, completely transfixed at the spectacle. “The helmets have to be stimulating the motor centers in coordinated ways to cause them to walk.”

Lynn shuddered. “They are like zombies, only not dead.”

Just inside the open doorway was a metal wire cage, six feet on a side, to keep the patients from approaching the door to the hallway. Some bumped into the cage just as others were bumping into the walls. The students could see that most of the people had their eyes closed, although a few had them open. Those who had them open had a distant, non-focused look, suggesting that whatever their eyes were seeing was not being registered in their brains. Their mouths were generally closed, although a few were open and drooling. Their expressions were totally blank. The patients made no sounds, even when they collided with one another. The noise in the room came from the grapplers as they brought patients in and deposited them into the crowd and snapped up others and took them off to the side.

Lynn stepped forward into the cage, propelled by her morbid curiosity. It was a sight like none she had ever seen or imagined in her wildest dreams. Michael joined her. Neither of them spoke. Suddenly a torrent of scented disinfectant liquid rained down from an elaborate high-pressure sprinkler system far up on the ceiling. Although it was short-lived, it was enough to drive both Lynn and Michael back into the hallway for a moment to keep from getting soaked. The patients ignored the sudden gush and kept up their endless, mindless wandering.

Stepping back into the cage area again, the students continued their marveling at the drama playing out in front of them. Informed by their neurology training, they knew how complex an activity such as walking was from a physiological perspective. It wasn’t enough to stimulate a specific muscle. There had to be a host of muscles stimulated to varying degrees as well as simultaneous, partial inhibition of the opposing muscles for a human to stand upright much less walk, and it all had to be coordinated through the part of the brain called the cerebellum. It was complicated enough to challenge a supercomputer.

“This is how they manage to keep these people alive,” Michael said, unable to take his eyes off the shuffling assemblage of brain-damaged patients. “This is why they don’t have trouble with pneumonias or the cardiovascular systems. People have to be mobilized or they degenerate. And the UV light provides vitamin D and antisepsis.”

“Oh, no!” Lynn cried suddenly with great anguish.

Michael’s eyes shot in her direction. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Carl,” Lynn cried, pointing off to the left.

Michael tried to follow her line of sight. It was difficult in the sea of people, jerkily staggering about in chaotic, unpredictable directions, reminding him of the Brownian movement of molecules. To make matters worse, it was hard to fixate on any given face, as they all looked remarkably the same with their blankness.

“Where, exactly?” Michael asked. He went up on his tiptoes, his eyes jumping from face to face, searching for a familiar one.

“I lost him,” Lynn said. She, too, was straining to see better.

“Are you sure you saw him?” Michael asked. “Or might it have been your imagination?”

“I saw him!” Lynn snapped angrily.

“Okay, keep it cool, girl.”

“I’m going out there,” Lynn announced with determination. The cage had a door made of the same wire mesh as the rest of the structure. It was secured with a normal throw bolt. Lynn gave it a twist. The door opened a crack.

Michael grabbed the door to keep it from opening more than a few inches. Several of the patients bumped into it. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, trying to be calm yet sound forceful.

“I don’t care what you think,” Lynn said. “I’m going out there and find him.”

“And do what?” Michael demanded. “Seeing him in here is going to be worse than seeing him in one of those damn cylinders, which would have been bad enough. Don’t do this to yourself! Be smart!”

Lynn pushed on the door. Michael kept ahold of it. It was a bit of a tug-of-war. Another patient bumped into it and then veered off like the others but not before hitting up against Michael’s fingers. By reflex of having been unexpectedly touched by one of the ghoulish ambulating inmates, Michael let go of the door. Before he could reach out and grab it again, Lynn had it open enough to squeeze out onto the main floor of the room.

“Shit, Lynn!” Michael yelled after her. “Get your ass back here! You’re acting crazy, girl! Fucking A,” he fumed under his breath. He pulled the door back into its jamb as another patient careened into it. It clicked shut. Michael went back up on his tiptoes. He had already lost sight of Lynn in the jerkily roiling mob. For a brief moment he debated what to do, wondering if he should just wait her out or go after her. It wasn’t as if he thought she could get hurt except emotionally. What he really wanted to do was get the hell out of the Shapiro.

Michael’s momentary torment was suddenly interrupted by the sounds of footfalls and voices in the hallway. He leaned back out through the open door into the corridor and shot a quick glance back up the way they had come. Approaching at a jog was a bevy of uniformed and armed hospital security people.

By reflex, Michael leaned back into the cage and hit the electronic door closer. On the outside was a thumbprint-activated touch pad, but on the inside there was a normal one. The door activated and slid closed, but before it could close completely, a hand shot in and halted it. Michael lifted a foot and gave the intruding fingers a significant kick. With an audible cry of pain, the fingers disappeared and the door sealed shut with a thud.

Faced with this new situation, Michael quickly ended his debate about what to do. He assumed the door to the hallway would not be a significant impediment to those out in the hall. Without further hesitation he opened the wire door and started in the general direction Lynn had gone. Within seconds he was completely surrounded by ambulating patients in various states of coma.

As Michael dodged the erratically plodding people, he experienced a weird déjà vu from having been a high school and college running back. Since he was plainly more eager than they to move quickly and cover ground in a specific direction, he bumped into a few with more force than he would have liked. To his astonishment, none of the patients fell down, a fact that impressed him. He guessed that the computer programs that were directing their walking were able to deal rapidly and appropriately with sudden changes in feedback information and recover enough to keep the patients on their feet.

After progressing twenty or thirty feet from the cage, Michael slowed and stopped, again going up on tiptoes. He had thought it would be relatively easy to locate Lynn since he was looking for the only person in the crowd with clothes, and in white, no less. But there were just so many people. The good side, he thought, was that it was going to be equally hard for the security guys to find them.

All at once Michael caught a momentary glimpse of Lynn’s white hat. Quickly moving in that direction, he came up behind her. She had found Carl and put her arms around him in a hugging embrace. Of course Carl wasn’t able to respond in kind. His arms were limp at his side, his face a tabula rasa, and his legs were continuing their walking motions even though Lynn was holding him in place.

Michael went behind Carl so that he could look into Lynn’s face. She had her eyes closed.

“We’ve been discovered!” Michael said to her. He shook her arm to break her trance.

Lynn’s eyes popped open.

“A bunch of hospital security appeared out in the hall,” Michael said anxiously. “Luckily I got the door closed before they could come in, but they are probably in now.”

Lynn nodded understanding, her face reflecting the same panic Michael was experiencing. She let go of Carl, and like a wind-up toy, he immediately veered off aimlessly.

“There is another entrance at the opposite end of the room,” Lynn cried.

“I’m sure that is what they expect,” Michael said. “They will catch us for sure. We have to do something unexpected.”

Despite the ambient noise from the grapplers and the conveyor systems, they could hear the unmistakable sound of the door to the cage being thrown open, clanging against the cage’s wall. Their pursuers were coming into the recreation room.

Both looked up at the grapplers, which were continuing their ceaseless operation. “No, that’s not going to work,” Lynn said. She sensed Michael had also briefly wondered if they could somehow use the grapplers to get out. “But maybe the conveyors.”

The duo had been aware that the grapplers were depositing and bringing back people from beyond an eight-foot-high barrier on either side of the room. Without even discussing the issue, they started off toward the right side. Lynn got behind Michael and held on to him as he forced his way through the crowd. Behind them they were aware of a major disturbance and assumed the security people were trying to force their way in their direction through the wandering, blank-faced patients.

Hoping they had an advantage of being only two and working in tandem, Michael and Lynn reached the barrier wall that ran along the right side of the room. Sensing the security people were closing in on them, they searched frantically for a door. When they found one, they discovered it had no electrical lever on the wall to open it, apparently for fear the patients would bump into it. A quick inspection revealed there was a handhold depression on the door itself. Lynn put her fingers into it and pulled. The door slid open with relative ease.

Shoving patients away to keep them from following, Lynn and Michael quickly stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind them. As they had assumed, they found themselves in the terminus for the conveyor systems for Clusters 4-B, 5-B, and 6-B. Each was conveniently labeled. Lined up like duckpins were three lines of patients waiting to be either returned to their respective cylinders or lifted and placed out in the recreation space. As in the cluster room they had visited, the handling of the patients was done by robotic machinery. The ambient noise from the conveyor systems was significantly louder than on the recreation-room floor.

“If this is going to work, we should try the conveyor belt for Cluster 5-B,” Lynn shouted over the din of the machinery. “We’ll be on the same floor as the exit door.”

Michael flashed a thumbs-up. As quickly as possible, they worked their way around the crowd of patients who were lined up, waiting to be sent back to their respective cylinders. In contrast to the other patients out on the floor, these patients were standing motionless, a feat as difficult from a programming perspective as making them walk.

Pushing on, Lynn and Michael skirted the robotic arms that placed the patients on the conveyor system for Cluster 5-B when cued. For the moment they were at rest, having just placed a patient. It was, the students thought, an opportune moment for them. Michael climbed up onto the belt on all fours. He motioned for Lynn to do the same.

Lynn cast a quick look behind her. Several security people were coming through the same door that she and Michael had used. Catching sight of Lynn, they yelled for her to stop.

Lynn ignored them and, mimicking Michael, leaped up onto the moving belt on all fours. The surface was a smooth and pliable silicone material, which afforded good traction. With Michael about ten feet in the lead but already out of sight, Lynn ducked her head as she was drawn into a four-foot-high tunnel.

About six feet past the entrance, the conveyor abruptly angled upward, and the tunnel progressively became darker. After Lynn was taken about twenty feet up the incline, the entire system came to a sudden halt.

“Shit!” she heard Michael’s voice say somewhere ahead. “Why did the fucking thing stop?”

“The security people saw me get on,” Lynn said. She began to crawl upward. She sensed Michael was doing the same, yet after only a short distance she bumped into his feet.

“Why did you stop?” Lynn asked. She could barely make out Michael’s form in front of her. She knew they had to hurry. She could hear voices behind them.

“We’re not alone in here,” Michael said. “There is a patient in front of me. We’re going to have to climb over. Are you okay with that?”

“We don’t have any choice. There should be enough room.” Lynn reached up and touched the ceiling. The tunnel was like a tube, with seemingly more than enough room to scramble over a body.

“I don’t think it is going to be difficult, but it sure as hell ain’t gonna be pretty.”

“We’ll manage,” Lynn said, although she wasn’t sure she believed it herself. She couldn’t think of too many experiences worse than climbing over a naked, comatose patient in an upwardly angled, dark cylinder.

Lynn heard Michael say, “Sorry, bro,” as he struggled forward. Lynn waited. Looking straight ahead and to the side of Michael’s dark form, she could see a bit of light, giving her the confidence there wasn’t that much farther to go.

“Okay,” Michael said a minute or so later. “Your turn! I’m sure this poor bastard is going to think you are a picnic after me.”

Getting past the patient was physically easier than Lynn had anticipated but psychologically more trying than she’d imagined. She struggled not to put any weight on the comatose person but wasn’t totally successful. The fact that he was supine rather than prone made it worse.

“Okay,” Lynn said breathlessly once she was past. She had been holding her breath while in close contact with the individual. Michael was waiting impatiently.

“Let’s get a move on!” Michael whispered urgently as he began crawling forward. They could hear voices behind them more clearly. “They might reverse the direction of the belt.”

After another fifteen feet of their racing on all fours, the belt leveled off and the ambient light increased dramatically, especially after the belt made a ninety-degree turn. After another ten feet they emerged into Cluster 5-B, which was a mirror image of Cluster 4-B. Relieved at having made it, both stood and climbed over the side. As they did so, the belt suddenly resumed operation, with the rollers moving in the opposite direction, as Michael had feared.

With a sense of partial relief from having avoided being pulled back into the clutches of the people chasing them, they used the conveyor superstructure to swing down and drop onto the walkway. With all conveyor machinery shut down, the room was quiet. The only real noise was from the intermittent flushing process in various cylinders.

The students lost no time. They rushed to the door leading out of the room and, once they determined the hallway was clear, made a mad dash for the exit. They ran past the NOC and soon skidded to a stop at the door to the outside. Michael snapped up their raincoats and handed Lynn hers, and they pulled them on quickly. They didn’t want to have to explain themselves if they ran into anybody on their way to the dorm or in the dorm itself.

“Ready?” Michael asked. His hand was poised above the door lever.

“More than ready,” Lynn said, glancing back over her shoulder. “Come on! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Michael hit the lever, but to their horror nothing happened! He hit it again several times in a row with the same effect. Then he pressed on the lever as hard as he could and held it. Still nothing. The door didn’t budge.

Lynn folded her arm against her torso and lunged at the door with her right shoulder. She hit it hard, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Michael did the same with the same result. The door was made of steel, with a solid core. It was meant as a significant barrier, and both of them knew it.

The two students eyed each other in desperation.

“What are we going to do?” Michael barked.

Lynn didn’t respond. Instead she whipped out the stapled bundle of floor plans and rapidly flipped through them.

“Come on, sis!” Michael snapped breathlessly. “We have to run. Our only chance is to cross over to the hospital. Are you looking for the best route?”

At that moment both heard the unmistakable sound of a door bursting open. They couldn’t see it and assumed it was the stairwell door.

“This way,” Lynn said hurriedly. She started forward in the opposite direction from the hospital.

Michael ran after her, trying to tell her they were headed in the wrong direction, but she ignored him. After turning a corner, Michael again tried to talk to her. Behind them they heard the sound of men running in their direction.

Lynn turned yet another corner, entering a long hallway that stretched out like a study in perspective. She was running at full speed, with Michael a few steps behind. They were passing doors on either side.

“Where the hell are we going?” Michael gasped.

Lynn continued to ignore him. Suddenly she stopped in front of one of the doors along the main corridor. She did it so precipitously that Michael plowed into her. He had to grab her with both hands to keep both of them from falling. She struggled out of his arms and hit the door’s opening lever. The moment it slid open, she dashed inside.

Michael followed. He was confused as to what she was doing. Before the pocket door had opened, he’d seen the block letters on the door that identified the room as PHARMACY AND GENERAL SUPPLIES. Once inside, he turned around and closed the door. Facing back into the highly air-conditioned room, he saw that it was filled from floor to ceiling with rows of shelving, crammed with all manner of drugs and associated supplies. To his further surprise, Lynn had disappeared.

Michael ran up the center aisle, glancing down each cross aisle, looking for Lynn. Her behavior had him baffled. He found her at the very back, on her hands and knees, in front of a relatively large metal latticework screen some two feet high and three feet wide that was positioned just above the baseboard and painted the same color as the wall. She had her screwdriver out and was madly removing the sheet-metal screws holding it in place.

“What the hell are you doing?” Michael demanded. “They are going to be in here in a flash and the ball game’s going to be over.”

“And we won’t be here,” Lynn said confidently.

“Are you suggesting...”

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” Lynn said quickly. She took out the last screw and then struggled to remove the grille. It wasn’t cooperating; dried paint was holding it in place. “When I was at the building commission today, I learned that the Shapiro shares infrastructure with the hospital, including the HVAC system. This return duct will take us back to the hospital.”

“I ain’t going in there, no way,” Michael said.

“We don’t have much of a choice,” Lynn said. She was now frantically using the screwdriver to scribe the periphery of the lattice. A moment later she was able to break it free from the wall. “Finally,” she voiced. She leaned the screen against the wall to the side of the opening and put down the screwdriver.

“How do you know you won’t get lost?” Michael said.

“Easy,” Lynn said. “We’ll follow the airflow. The good thing is that the ducts have to get larger and not smaller.”

“How come you picked this room out of all the rooms we passed?”

“I knew a pharmacy would be kept cooler than other rooms, meaning bigger ducts. And we are in luck. I don’t see any video cameras in here.”

With mounting panic, Michael glanced up at the ceiling. She was right. There were no cameras. Then he bent down and stared into the duct. Compared with this dark, narrow duct, dealing with the conveyor system had been a comparative picnic. Considering his size, he wasn’t sure he’d even fit.

“We got to do this, bro,” Lynn said. “It might take us a while, and I hope you are not claustrophobic. You want to go first or second? Whoever goes second has to try to reposition the grille.”

“You first,” Michael said.

“Okay,” Lynn said, trying to bolster her courage. Despite what she had said to Michael, she had serious misgivings about what they were about to do. At the same time she knew they had to either try it or give up. And with the enormity of what they had discovered on their visit, she wasn’t eager to put herself and Michael into the hands of Sidereal Pharmaceuticals or Middleton Healthcare.

Taking a deep breath, Lynn stretched out her arms in front of her and then, using her feet, pushed herself headfirst into the duct. By slithering like a snake, she found moving on the metal surface was actually easier than she had envisioned. She’d gone six or seven feet into the steadily growing darkness when she heard the metal grate hit against its housing. She sensed Michael was not behind her. Without being able to turn around or even see behind her with ease, she called out to Michael. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m replacing the grille,” he called to her. “You go get the Marines. I’ll duke it out here. Who knows? Maybe they won’t find me, at least right off.”

“Michael!” Lynn yelled loud enough to hurt her ears in the confines of the duct. “That’s not fair. You tricked me!”

“For good reason,” Michael said. “If they found this grille detached, they would know what we were up to. This way you have a fighting chance, not that I envy you. Go to it, girl!”

“Michael,” Lynn yelled again, but with a bit less volume. “Don’t do this! We are a team. Those were your words.”

“Sorry,” Michael said. “The ball’s through the hoop and the game’s over. Good luck!”

“Michael, please!” Lynn yelled, but he didn’t answer. “Michael, are you still there?” Silence reigned.

“Holy shit,” Lynn murmured. For a moment she debated trying to back up and see if she could kick the grate off. The reality was that she didn’t think she could. Instead, after taking another breath, she began crawling forward, going deeper into the confined, utter darkness.

48.

Thursday, April 9, 3:24 A.M.

Benton Rhodes clicked off his smartphone and slipped it into his pocket. He had been playing Angry Birds to entertain himself but he had run out of patience. He checked the time. More than two hours had passed since the security team had gone after the students. Although they had quickly cornered and tranquilized one of them after a relatively short chase, the other was irritatingly still at large.

“That’s it,” Benton said. He pushed back his chair and stood up to stretch. He, Fyodor, and Misha were still in the control center. Viktor had been busy supervising the Shapiro staff to get the automation equipment on floors four through six that had been shut down back online.

Fyodor and Misha turned to look at him. They, too, had been killing time. Everybody was tired and on edge.

“I think we should go ahead with the mock surgery on the male,” Benton said. “There is no reason to wait to find the female, and Dr. Phillips has been ready for almost an hour.”

“Fine with us,” Fyodor said.

“When do you think you’ll find the female?” Benton asked. He couldn’t keep derision from his voice.

“It should be soon,” Fyodor said. “We have brought in more personnel, and we are going to be systematic about it, starting from the sixth floor and working down. Frankly we are surprised she has eluded us this long. Obviously she’s found somewhere to hide. We didn’t expect that they would split up.”

“Can one of you get me to the patient viewing room A?”

“Of course,” Fyodor said.

49.

Thursday, April 9, 4:35 A.M.

Lynn could tell she was nearing the end of what had been an arduous journey, both physically and psychologically. The first hour had been the hardest, as the size of the duct remained small. She had come to multiple junctions, some of which were hard for her to negotiate. At times she had to squeeze forward on her side and bend at the waist to get around sharp corners. As difficult as it was in places where she had to negotiate what seemed initially like insurmountable barriers, she seriously questioned whether she would be able to back up. A few times she used the flashlight app on her phone to help, but otherwise she remained in absolute darkness. Purposefully, she mostly kept her eyes tightly closed. With them open, she felt more claustrophobic and frightened. She was thankful there was a constant and gradually increasing breeze moving through the duct, assuring her she was moving in the right direction, particularly at junctions. The draft also kept her from feeling suffocated in the tight space. As difficult a time as she was having, she tried not to think about Michael and what he might be facing.

After the first hour of worming her way deeper and deeper into the system, the dimensions of the duct increased in a progressive, incremental fashion. Eventually she was able to make significant headway when the duct became large enough for her to crawl on all fours, as she and Michael had done in the conveyor tunnel. When the duct angled downward, she adopted a sitting position to slide down on her backside, as if she were on a slide in a children’s playground. But out of fear that she might collide with something at the bottom, she inched along, keeping her feet pressed against the sides.

Once the duct again became flat and she could walk bent over at the waist, she made better time. To help orient herself, she ran her hands lightly along the metal sides. As she continued forward, she became more and more aware that the noise level and the turbulence of the moving air were increasing. She guessed they were coming from fans, which she assumed had to be large and powerful to move so much air over so great a distance. It dawned on her that she was getting close, and she began to worry that in the dark she might stumble into one of them.

Such concerns forced her to turn on her flashlight app before proceeding, yet she soon realized that using such a bright light would quickly exhaust her phone’s battery. Instead of the flashlight app, she just used the light from the screen, which was more than adequate. The only problem was that the phone kept turning off.

A hundred feet farther on, the duct suddenly enlarged significantly, and ten feet beyond that, the passageway was completely blocked by a large dark gray filter screen. From the noise and vibration, Lynn could tell that the fan or fans were just on the other side.

With a new concern that she might be trapped by the filter blocking the duct, she approached it and reached out to see if it would hinge or somehow open. It didn’t move. With the battery clearly weakening, she went back to the flashlight app and shined what light it was producing around the filter’s border. That was when she noticed a narrow band of exterior light along the right-hand edge.

Lynn turned off her phone. The line of light along the filter’s border was easier to see, and stretched from the duct’s floor to its ceiling, giving her the idea that the filter slid in at that point from the outside. She tried again to move it by pushing in that direction. With some effort it moved this time. She pushed it out a few feet, noticing a dramatic increase in the airflow moving past her. To look beyond the filter, she went to turn on her flashlight again. But just before doing so, she noticed an additional, less intense vertical line of light coming in through the wall of the duct to her right, a few feet back from the filter.

Suddenly encouraged, Lynn turned her flashlight back on and shined it in the direction of this new line of light. What she saw was a hinged access panel and, most important, it was fitted with a handle. Pocketing her phone, she tried the handle. A moment later she was able to crack open the panel enough to see that beyond was a lighted machinery space.

As much as she wanted to burst out and escape the claustrophobic confines of the duct, Lynn forced herself to be slow and careful. Despite the noise and vibration of the fan or possibly fans, which had to be close beyond the filter, she tried to listen for any sounds of life in the machinery room. Quickly realizing it was impossible to tell, she carefully opened the panel farther, slowly and noiselessly, to afford herself a gradually expanding view of the room beyond. At that point in her ordeal the last thing she wanted was to run into someone and have to explain herself. Luckily she saw no one, even when the panel was wide open.

Being reasonably sure she was alone in the room, which was not surprising since it was past four-thirty in the morning, Lynn scrambled out through the opening and lowered herself to the floor. She had no idea where she was and just hoped she was in the hospital mechanical spaces, and not still somewhere in the Shapiro.

The first thing Lynn did was check for service on her phone. Now that she was out, her first thoughts were for Michael and how he was faring. Unfortunately there was no phone service, at least not in the hospital basement, where she hoped she was. Without being able to make a call, she quickly scanned the room for the exit. She was about to run to it when she became aware of how filthy she was. Looking down, she could see that the once-white Shapiro coveralls were almost black on her chest, abdomen, the front side of her legs, and the underside of her arms. She’d been totally unaware of how much dust there was in the air-conditioning ducts. Now she worried her face might be equally as soiled.

Lynn did not want to draw attention to herself, particularly from security. Understanding the apparent complicity of Sidereal Pharmaceuticals and Middleton Healthcare, she was not willing to trust any authorities. Despite the hour, she thought the chances were good she would run into some people in the hospital even if she tried to avoid it. Although the hospital slowed at night, it never completely slept. She had to do something about her appearance.

Lynn tore off the Shapiro hat. She did the same with the mask, which was still tied around her neck. The hat was soiled but not as much as her scrubs. She tossed the hat and the mask into a waste container, and ran over to a sink. Cupping her hands, she rinsed her face and then quickly dried it with paper towels.

As dirty as the towels were after drying herself, she knew she had been right about her face. There was no mirror to check, so she rinsed her face yet again. This time the paper towels were only slightly dirty. She tried to use wet paper towels to clean her scrubs. It was useless. She wished she had not abandoned the raincoat in the duct as soon as she had been able to get it off.

Frantically she looked around for some other, more normal coveralls, anything she could possibly use to cover herself, but there was nothing. It was clear that what she needed to do was to get up to the women’s changing room off the surgical lounge and get a clean set of normal hospital scrubs. She didn’t think it would be a problem at that time of the night, as the ORs were generally quiet, and the changing rooms even more so. She also knew it would be a convenient place to use her phone, as there was a good signal. What she wanted to do more than anything was call Markus Vandermeer. She wanted the FBI and the CIA or even, as Michael joked, the Marines. As far as she was concerned, she couldn’t even be totally confident of local law enforcement. Middleton Healthcare was a powerful and important player in local politics.

Lynn cracked the door, which she assumed would lead out into a basement corridor, but it didn’t. Apparently the huge HVAC system had its own space. The door led into an even larger machinery area. Here Lynn saw some hospital workers facing a large console filled with all manner of gauges. Like the main HVAC room, the ambient noise was significant and the lighting equally bright.

It wasn’t difficult for Lynn to see what was undoubtedly the main door out of the area, as it was a pair of doors rather than just one. To further corroborate her suspicion, while she was watching, a worker came in, offering her a brief but encouraging glance out to what looked like a more typical hospital corridor.

Lynn watched for a short time. The workers seemed intent on their respective jobs, alternately checking gauges and writing in logs. No one, it seemed, paid much attention to the main exit except when they used it. Finally Lynn decided to take a chance.

Walking quickly, but not so quickly that she would draw attention, Lynn traversed the industrial-style setting. She felt terribly obvious but accepted that there was little she could do about it. She had no idea what she was going to say if someone stopped her. Luckily no one did. She went out through the double doors and sighed with relief.

Taking her phone out yet again, Lynn checked for a signal as she ran down the hall. There was still none. The battery power was less than five percent, so she switched the phone off. She entered the first stairwell she came to, fearful of eventually running into someone in the main hallway. There was no way she was going to use the elevator.

She took the stairs by twos and threes, hardly pausing on the landings. Passing the first floor, she continued up at the same pace until she reached the second. There she paused briefly to see about the phone signal. Finally there was something, but it wasn’t much. But at least now she knew she was close to her goal, the women’s surgical locker room.

The stairway opened up in a section of the second floor across from the Surgical Pathology Department and not far from the Anesthesia office where she and Michael had spoken with Sandra Wykoff. Lynn hurriedly passed through the area and reached the main bank of elevators, where she slowed. She saw no one, although she could hear the TV in the surgical lounge. Pausing at the open door, she carefully glanced inside.

Two orderlies were enjoying coffee and newspapers. There were no nurses. Lynn took it as an opportune time to pass through, which she did at a pace that wouldn’t garner attention. She went directly into the women’s changing room. Luckily it was completely empty, as she had hoped.

The first thing she did was tear off the Shapiro scrubs, roll them up, and push them down into the bottom of the trash bin, making sure they were completely covered. Once she had pulled on a new set of normal scrubs, she took out her cell phone, and now the signal was fine as she anticipated. From her contacts she pulled up the Vandermeer home phone number and pressed it. While waiting for it to go through, she checked the time. It was going on five o’clock in the morning.

It was Leanne who answered. After apologizing for the hour, Lynn asked to speak to her husband, explaining that it was important. When Markus came on the line, Lynn didn’t waste time. At the moment, her main concern was Michael.

“Sidereal Pharmaceuticals is not doing unauthorized drug testing on patients,” she said in a rush. “It is much, much worse. They are using the patients to make drugs and causing them illness and even death in the process.”

“Okay, slow down!” Markus said, trying to wrap his sleepy mind around what Lynn had said. “Come again?”

Somewhat slower but with even more conviction and passion, Lynn repeated herself.

“How do you know this?” Markus demanded. Lynn could hear the sudden seriousness in his voice.

“Michael Pender and I broke into the Shapiro Institute tonight,” Lynn said. “You are aware that it is run a bit like Fort Knox.”

“Of course,” Markus said. “It is for the benefit of the patients, keeping them from various diseases.”

“That might be true to an extent. But from what we have found, we think it is more a cover for what they are really doing, and that is putting the patients at risk to produce monoclonal antibody drugs. And it is not just the inmates of the Shapiro. They are doing it with many ambulatory patients hospitalized in Middleton Healthcare hospitals. It is a massive conspiracy between Sidereal and Middleton. We are sure, as sure as we can be. And there’s more. This is the worst part, especially for you and your wife and me personally. Carl’s condition was deliberately caused so that he would be moved into the Shapiro to produce a specific drug. It wasn’t an accident! It was a recruitment.”

For a moment there was silence. Lynn thought that perhaps they had been disconnected. “Markus, are you still there?” she asked.

“I’m here,” Markus said. “I’m trying to process all this. It is overwhelming.”

“I know it is horrendous,” Lynn admitted. “And there have to be a lot of top people involved. Otherwise it couldn’t happen. I think they are making billions.”

“Are you and Michael still in the Shapiro?”

“I’m not. We were discovered in there and chased. I got out through the HVAC system. Michael covered my tracks and is still in there. I have to assume they caught him and are still looking for me. Something has to be done, and done immediately! They could kill him.”

“Okay!” Markus said. “I will immediately call the federal authorities, the FBI specifically. Where are you at the moment? Are you safe?”

“I’m in the women’s surgical lounge in the main hospital.”

“Have you spoken with anyone else?”

“No one. I don’t know whom to trust.”

“Smart! Maybe you should just leave. Get away from there.”

“I still have Carl’s car.”

“Drive it away. Come here!”

“Okay,” Lynn said. “But Michael? What’s going to happen?”

“We will put it in the hands of the federal authorities. Perhaps a state SWAT team can be immediately mustered. For the moment I would prefer to keep the local police out of it, just in case.”

“I agree,” Lynn said.

“All right, get yourself over here. By the time you’re here I’ll know more.”

50.

Thursday, April 9, 5:11 A.M.

After pocketing her phone and taking a deep breath, Lynn looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. She was glad she hadn’t run into anyone since climbing out of the air-conditioning duct. Despite having rinsed her face, Lynn saw it was still streaked with dirt, which made her look somewhat like a raccoon. Recognizing that she would undoubtedly run into people, she knew she had to make herself appear more presentable. With a bit more effort and a little soap, she was able to improve her appearance dramatically. She even straightened her hair, using her fingers as a comb. Accepting that she wouldn’t be able to marshal much more of an improvement, she at last gave up.

Her plan was to try to avoid everybody as much as possible. If approached or questioned, she’d be pleasant but self-contained. The place she was most concerned about was the parking garage, as it was patrolled by hospital security after a recent episode with a nurse being confronted in the wee hours of the morning. She wanted to steer clear of all security people.

Coming out through the door of the women’s lounge, she noticed that a nurse had appeared and was helping herself to coffee. Lynn started for the exit to the main hall feeling like a cat with its ears back. She avoided so much as glancing at the nurse, hoping to elude attention. Instead she looked off to the side, and because of this, her eye happened to catch a glimpse of the monitor on the wall, which indicated there was a neurosurgical case in progress in OR 12. The surgeon was Norman Phillips. It was what explained the paucity of people in the surgical lounge.

Lynn did a double take and stopped dead in her tracks. She blinked, hoping her eyes were playing tricks on her. The patient’s name was Michael Pender! The diagnosis was subdural hematoma, and the planned procedure was an emergency craniotomy.

A short, involuntary cry — more like something a tortured animal might make — escaped from Lynn’s lips. Frantically, she looked to see what the timing was. The case had started only a few minutes before, at 4:58 A.M.! “No!” she cried with enough volume to shock the three people in the surgical lounge.

Lynn spun around, her eyes stretched open to their limits. “No! No! Not again!” she yelled to no one in particular. The people in the room stared at her and didn’t move. They were frozen in place, gaping at her unblinkingly, fearing she was mentally unbalanced.

A second later, Lynn was out the door in a headlong rush toward the paired swinging doors leading to the OR proper. As she ran, she pulled out her phone. Just inside the OR’s doors, she paused briefly to bring up onto the screen her last call. Quickly she reconnected it, holding the phone to her ear as she began to run again. Behind her she heard the nurse from the surgical lounge yell for her to stop, saying she was not allowed in the OR. The nurse had burst through the swinging doors right after Lynn and was now chasing after her.

Coming to a halt outside of OR 12, Lynn was relieved to hear Markus’s voice. Breathlessly she told him Michael was in surgery. “This has to be stopped. It can’t be allowed!” Lynn cried. “He’s not going to wake up. I know it! The same thing that happened to Carl is going to happen to Michael!”

The nurse who had chased Lynn ran up to her. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded shrilly.

Lynn ignored her, concentrating on talking with Markus. “You have to get someone here now! The police, the FBI, anybody! Please! He is in OR Twelve! You have to stop this!”

“Hello?!” the nurse yelled, extending the word in the form of a question while she tried to get the phone out of Lynn’s hands. “You can’t be in here!”

Lynn disconnected from Markus and roughly pulled the phone away from the nurse’s grasp. For a brief instant she eyed the nurse, who was looking at her as if she were a crazy person.

“Let’s not cause trouble,” the nurse said, trying to speak as calmly as possible. She reached out to grab Lynn’s arm to lead her back out of the OR.

With a blow as forceful as a karate punch, Lynn knocked the nurse’s hand away. Spinning on her heels, Lynn pushed through into the operating room. Inside, there were five people: anesthetized the patient; the gowned and gloved surgeon; a similarly attired operating nurse; the anesthesiologist; and a circulating nurse. Initially, no one looked in Lynn’s direction, and everyone continued their banter. Benton, functioning as the anesthesiologist, and Norman, the neurosurgeon, were talking about golf while Norman operated. The scrub nurse and the circulating nurse were discussing scheduling. It wasn’t until the second nurse burst in behind Lynn and loudly ordered her out of the operating room that activity and conversation in the room stopped, and everyone’s attention galvanized on Lynn’s sudden presence.

Lynn ignored the nurse as she had out in the hallway. Any vestigial hope that the patient might be some other Michael Pender vanished the moment Lynn could see him. It was definitely her dearest friend. She was absolutely sure even though part of his face and his body was covered with surgical drapes. Michael was in a sitting position, with an endotracheal tube in place and his eyes taped shut. The breathing bag on the anesthesia machine was rhythmically expanding and contracting with his breathing. The cardiac monitor was beeping a steady signal. The surgeon had already turned a scalp flap and was preparing to drill a burr hole.

Without a second’s hesitation, Lynn stepped over to the anesthesia machine and bent down to look at its side. She wanted to see the number. As she feared, it was machine 37. She straightened up. The nurse who had run in after her again loudly ordered her out of the operating room, telling everyone that Lynn was apparently deranged.

Continuing to ignore the nurse, who was again trying to get ahold of Lynn’s arm, Lynn turned to the circulating nurse. “You have to get another anesthesia machine stat! This one’s trouble! People don’t wake up.”

“Please!” the first nurse said, resorting to begging. “You must leave!”

Benton recovered his shock and, after fumbling on the surface of the anesthesia machine, came up with a filled syringe. Without warning he came at Lynn like a bull in a china shop, causing another similar syringe perched on the anesthesia machine to fall to the floor. The nurse who had come in behind Lynn let go of Lynn’s arm and stepped back in fright.

Thanks to Lynn’s inherent and honed athleticism from her years playing lacrosse, she easily eluded Benton, effectively ducking under his arm and running around the operating table with the idea of keeping it between herself and the enraged anesthesiologist. When Benton started one way, Lynn went the other. While they were jockeying for position, Lynn again urged the circulating nurse to get another anesthesia machine. “If you do that, I will leave,” Lynn yelled. “Otherwise I’m going to stay in here until you do.” Her voice echoed off the tiled walls.

The circulating nurse was confused as to what to do and looked toward Benton for direction.

“I’m getting hospital security,” the first nurse declared. Without waiting for a response from the operating team, she disappeared out the door into the OR hallway.

Dr. Norman Phillips, who had been momentarily paralyzed by this unexpected spectacle during his case, quickly recovered. He handed off his craniotome, which he had been about to use, to the scrub nurse and stepped back from standing directly behind Michael. Obviously willing to break scrub — contaminate his gloves and gown — by holding his arms and gloved hands out in front of himself, he threatened to block Lynn from moving in his direction so that she couldn’t continue circling the operating table.

Lynn immediately took the neurosurgeon up on his offer to join the confrontation. She wanted to be as disruptive as possible, knowing that if the surgeon broke scrub he’d have to start all over again, wasting significant time in the process. Her hope was to maximize the delay in order to keep anything from happening to Michael until help, in the form of Markus Vandermeer, somehow got there. The problem was, she didn’t have any idea of how long that might be. What Lynn didn’t want was to have both Benton and Norman get ahold of her at the same time. She could well imagine what was probably in the syringe.

Pretending for the moment she was on a lacrosse field and that she was playing men’s lacrosse and not women’s, she body-checked Norman at full speed, hitting him with her shoulder and driving upward. She had seen Carl do it in old films he had from his college days. It worked superbly, catching the neurosurgeon completely off guard and knocking him off his feet to sprawl on the floor. She knew that was breaking scrub about as much as humanly possible.

Benton, rushing up behind Lynn, caught sight of this impressive display and skidded to a stop. Lynn took the opportunity to give a sharp chop with the edge of her hand to Benton’s outstretched forearm with the hand holding the syringe. The syringe flew from his grasp, and falling to the floor, it spun safely under the operating table.

Lynn ran back around to the other side of the room after leaping over Norman, who was struggling to catch his breath. Spinning around, she waited for the next attack. Benton went back to the anesthesia machine, pulled out a small drawer, and struggled to get a new syringe filled with a mammoth dose of midazolam. Norman picked himself up off the floor, checking to be sure he had no broken bones.

“A different anesthesia machine!” Lynn yelled yet again to the circulating nurse or anyone else who would listen. “That’s all I’m asking. I’ll leave if you get it and use it.” She didn’t know if the planned surgery was indicated or not. Her guess was that it was not, but the surgery per se wasn’t her main concern. It was the number 37 anesthesia machine.

“Dr. Rhodes?” the circulating nurse said. “What should I do?”

“Nothing,” Benton sneered. He got the syringe filled and tossed aside the vial. Again prepared, he looked over at Norman, who’d now totally recovered. Both nodded and turned their full attention to Lynn. They then started around the OR table in opposite directions with the idea of trapping her.

Having been successful using the body check with Norman and still definitely reluctant to deal with both men at once, Lynn immediately launched a similar attack on Benton as she had done on Norman. Accelerating to near full speed, she ran at him. And once again, just before impact she crouched slightly so that when she hit him she could lunge upward with the point of her shoulder. At the last second before contact, Benton reared back defensively, having witnessed the effect on Norman. The ploy managed to cushion the collision significantly. But it also meant that both he and Lynn lost their footing with her momentum.

Lynn fell directly on top of Benton. She could hear the wind whoosh out of his lungs, and then she felt him struggling vainly to catch his breath even more than what Norman had experienced. Scrambling to her feet, she realized he had managed to stab her with the syringe, whether he meant to or not, when they when they met head-on. Buried almost to the hilt, it was still sticking out of her forearm.

But she didn’t have time to worry how much of the contents might have been injected or whether it had been enough to compromise her. There was a more pressing problem. Norman had come around the operating table and was rushing at her like she had done to him, and as close as he was at that moment, there was no chance for her to be offensive. Instead, like she had done hundreds of times while playing lacrosse, she stepped aside at the very last moment like a matador, and the man mostly missed her. Yet he was able to grab a handful of her scrub top as he sailed past, and because of it, managed to keep his feet.

With as much force as she could muster, Lynn tried to tear herself free from Norman’s clutches, but he held on and even managed to get a ahold of her left wrist with his other hand. Lynn reached up with her free hand and grabbed his face mask and gave it a fearsome yank, snapping his head forward before the elastic broke. But he didn’t let go of either her clothes or her wrist. She struggled madly to get away, but no matter what she did, Norman held on.

Having caught his breath, Benton came to Norman’s aid. After suffering a few significant slaps in the face, he was able to get Lynn’s still-free arm. But that still left her feet and legs free.

Lynn struggled as much as she could, kicking both of them in the legs at least once. She was aiming higher but unable to manage it.

When the men thought they had the wild woman under a semblance of control, as she seemed to be tiring, they started toward the OR door with the intention of getting her out in the hallway. But that was easier said than done. Lynn made it as difficult as possible, particularly by getting one foot or the other on the doorjamb on each attempt and lunging backward with as strong a kick as she could muster. From her kickboxing, her legs were powerful.

“Can you hold her while I get more Versed?” Benton squeaked.

“To be honest, I don’t know,” Norman said hoarsely. “What a vixen. Who the hell is she?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Benton said.

“I’ll tell you who I am! I’m a fourth-year medical student. The patient is my friend. I want a different anesthesia machine!”

Without warning, Benton balled his fist and struck Lynn in the face, bringing blood from her already injured nose. The blow caught Norman by surprise and for a second he loosened his grip on Lynn’s arm. Lynn took advantage of this and snatched her right arm free. Mimicking Benton, she formed a fist and hit him with a blow surprisingly similar to his, bloodying his nose, as he had done to hers.

At that moment, directly in front of the three struggling people, the door to the hallway burst open. It was the original nurse. She rushed in. Following her and wearing surgical gowns pulled on like bathrobes over their hospital security uniforms were the same five men who had been chasing Lynn and Michael inside the Shapiro Institute. Lynn didn’t recognize their faces, just their uniforms, as they were slightly different from the normal uniforms worn by hospital security.

“No!” Lynn cried. “I don’t want to go with them.”

“I think you should have thought of that before you burst in here,” the nurse said triumphantly. She stepped aside so that the sizable men could rush in and take hold of Lynn. Still she struggled, but it was no use. In a moment they had her out in the hallway.

“Get her on a gurney!” Benton shouted to the security people. “I’ll be out in a second with some medication.” He exchanged a glance of incredulity and disgust with Norman. “You’re right! What a fucking vixen!” he said as he quickly went back to the anesthesia machine. He wanted to get yet another syringe and another vial of midazolam.

“This will go down as my most unique craniotomy,” Norman complained as he began peeling off his contaminated surgical gown and gloves. He looked back over at Michael, who had remained unconscious in the midst of the melee. “Is he all right through this?”

“He’s all right,” Benton said with a wave of his hand. He looked at the monitor. “The guy’s as healthy as an ox.”

Benton drew up the drug, purposefully going a bit overboard on the dosage. He didn’t want any more scenes. While Norman went to scrub again, Benton went out to the gurney in the hallway. The security guards had Lynn pressed down on its surface. All five men had ahold of her. Confident that the men had her adequately restrained, he decided to go the IV route, with enough of a dose that he was confident would keep her in never-never land for hours.

“I refuse any medication,” Lynn cried, trying to be authoritative.

“As if I care,” Benton sneered.

“Is this the woman we were searching for in the Shapiro?” one of the security guards asked. He had a mild but definite Russian accent.

“This is the one,” Benton said as he applied a tourniquet around Lynn’s upper arm and swabbed the crook of her elbow. “Now you realize why it would have been far better if you had nabbed her when you should have.”

From force of habit before making the injection and with the idea of eliminating any air, Benton held up the syringe in front of his face, the needle pointing toward the ceiling. As he did so he caught sight of the double doors at the very end of the hall bursting open and what looked like a line of people surging into the OR suite. Benton moved the syringe out of his line of sight and focused to get a better view. He was mystified. It was a lot of people, a lot more than should be coming into the OR at that time in the morning.

Transfixed and not a little confused, Benton watched as this long line of people approached at a run. He could see that they were mostly men, which was also perplexing because he knew that the majority of the OR staff was female. And stranger still, like the hospital security men who were beside him, holding Lynn down on the gurney, these newcomers were wearing hospital gowns pulled on backward, with the opening in the front, not the back.

As this new group neared, Benton’s confusion began to metamorphose to fear. With each running step he got a glimpse that they were wearing uniforms, again like the hospital security men next to him, but with a difference. Benton could see that the color wasn’t brown, like the color of the uniforms worn by hospital security, but gray like the South Carolina Highway Patrol. Worse still, most had their service revolvers clutched in their hands...