Pandemic

37

THURSDAY, 12:27 P.M.

Knowing he was only in marginal control of his emotions after what the day had already wrought, Jack made an effort to keep himself on an even keel despite Harvey Lauder. Moving quickly, he pushed through the door into the side room, hoping at least to catch Ted. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there. The room was designed to facilitate decontamination if the case had needed biosafety 3 protection. It was also where the latex gloves, the shoe covers, and the impervious gown were left for disposal and the face shield was left to be cleaned. Jack accomplished this on the run and then exited into the hallway. Picking up his pace, he power-walked down to the men’s locker room. Going through the door, he practically bumped into Ted, who was already on his way out. Ted was dressed as he had been the day before, in a white shirt, conservative Ivy League tie, and a long, highly starched white coat.

“I beg your pardon,” Jack said.

“Not at all,” Ted said. “Wow! You already finished the autopsy? You are very efficient, I must say.”

“I left the rest for Harvey,” Jack said. “It was mostly done. I have some questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m afraid I do mind,” Ted said. He pushed by Jack and opened the door to the hallway. “As I said in the autopsy room, I have a clinic full of patients that I ignored to observe the autopsy on Margaret. Thank you again for your help, but I really have to go.”

Before Jack could even respond Ted was out the door and it began to close. Jack straight-armed the door and ran after Ted. In his usual hyper fashion, Ted was moving at a rapid clip.

Catching up to the man with some effort, Jack reached out, grabbed his left arm just above the elbow, and pulled him to a stop.

To Jack’s shock, Ted responded by angrily yanking his arm from Jack’s grasp. “Don’t you dare lay a hand on me,” he snarled.

Taken aback by this unexpected response in light of Ted’s overly cordial behavior from their very first interaction, Jack raised his hands in a kind of surrender. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I don’t like to be manhandled,” Ted snapped as he smoothed the sleeve of his white doctor’s coat. Without waiting for a response from Jack, he recommenced walking quickly to the elevators, where he hit the call button multiple times.

Jack caught up to him a second time. “I have more questions I need to ask,” he said. His voice had an edge. He was both confused and put off by Ted’s surprising behavior, but mostly the latter.

“It will have to be another time,” Ted said. His eyes rose to see which elevator was going to arrive first.

“I visited the Bannons,” Jack said. “It was their son who was the donor for Carol Stewart’s heart. I got the impression that they might have been paid. Do you know anything about that?”

“Absolutely not,” Ted said. He moved down to the second elevator, as the lights indicated it was on its way. “My role was with the recipient, as you already know. Like all centers, we keep a sharp separation between the recipient interests and those of the donor, to avoid even the appearance of unethical behavior.”

The elevator arrived and the doors opened. Ted quickly boarded.

“How do you explain that Carol and the donor heart she was given matched with their CODIS profiles?” Jack asked. “We ran the test twice.”

“I haven’t a clue,” Ted said. He hit the button for the second floor. The doors began to close.

Jack grabbed the edge of the elevator door and stopped it from closing. “How did it happen that Dr. Wei Zhao is the executor of Carol Stewart’s estate?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Ted said. “Let go of the door or I will call security!”

Reluctantly, Jack let go of the elevator door. It responded by opening. “I need answers to these questions,” he said. “I’m not going to give up until I get them.”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” Ted said. “Ask Dr. Zhao. Maybe he can help you.”

A moment later, Jack was staring at the blank, closed elevator doors. He felt a building rage compounded by the frustration of not understanding the sudden attitude change of Dr. Ted Markham. One minute he’d been warm and welcoming, the next cold and distant. Jack hadn’t been as surprised by Stephen’s sudden personality change. He’d never seemed particularly sincere to Jack.

As he walked back to the morgue locker room, Jack tried to remember what exactly he had said when both doctors suddenly morphed from being interested observers to wanting to leave. It had happened right after he’d posed the question of whether or not some evidence of rejection phenomena was expected to be seen with heart transplants. Jack had done only one other heart transplant autopsy prior to Carol Stewart. It had been way back during his training in Chicago, but he distinctly remembered seeing some signs of inflammation both in the pericardium and in the heart itself. And he remembered that case had been described as a fairly good match.

As Jack pulled on his chambray shirt and began to knot his knit tie, the required concentration calmed him down a degree. “What a day,” he complained out loud. Intuitively he knew anger and acting out wouldn’t help him get through the next five or six hours, as it never did. Instead he tried to think of what his options were. They seemed limited. He could go back to the city and try to participate in some way with the identification of the virus, but the moment he thought of the idea, he dismissed it. Bioinformatics was something he knew close to nothing about. When he thought about going home, he dismissed it out of hand. There was no way he would be willing to sit around and make small talk with Sheldon and Dorothy Montgomery. Of course, he could try to relate to Emma, but that might make him more depressed than he already was. He could spend some time with JJ, but JJ didn’t get home from school until after 4:30.

Hooking an index finger under the tab of his bomber jacket, Jack slung it over his shoulder and walked out of the morgue locker room. As frustrating as his visit seemed to be becoming, he thought he wouldn’t leave Dover Valley Hospital just yet. Going through his mind was Ted’s suggestion. Maybe he should be directing his questions to Wei Zhao. The problem was how to do it. With the level of security the man insisted on, it wasn’t as if Jack could walk up and ring his doorbell. Yesterday, it clearly had been Ted and Stephen who had gotten him the invite to the man’s house. Maybe that could work again, and with Stephen in surgery, it left Ted.

Returning to the elevators, Jack took one up to the second floor. His destination was Ted’s office, which he knew the exact location of, thanks to the man’s hospitality yesterday. Jack didn’t know what he was going to say after the unflattering brushoff the man had given him at the elevator, but he trusted something would come to mind. He was convinced one of his strengths was the ability to wing it in any given situation.

Walking through the Zhao Heart Center, Jack could see that Ted had not been exaggerating. The clinic was crowded with patients waiting to be seen. Jack passed the check-in counter, heading for Ted’s private office. Jack thought it would be far more successful to talk with Ted’s secretary, who had gotten Jack’s coffee the day before, than with one of the clinic clerks.

As Jack neared his destination, he could see that Ted’s office door was closed. He didn’t know if that was a good sign or bad, as to whether Ted was there or down the hall seeing patients in the examination cubicles. Hoping to at least find out, he approached the secretary, who was typing on her monitor. She looked up when Jack made his presence known. Instantly, he could tell that she recognized him, but she made an effort to conceal it by merely asking if she could help him.

“I need to talk to the doctor,” Jack said in a compelling tone.

“I will see if he’s available. Who should I say is calling?”

“Dr. Denton Cooley,” Jack said, coming up on the spur of the moment with the name of one of the most famous cardiac surgeons in America. He thought it was a name Ted would respond to in a positive fashion even though Cooley had recently passed away. Whether the secretary remembered Jack’s real name, which he had given the day before, he couldn’t tell. Without another word she disappeared inside the inner office.

Jack mentally ticked off the seconds she was gone from force of habit. He was glad he did. When she emerged just over ten seconds later she said, “I’m sorry, but he is not available. He has just stepped out.”

“Interesting,” Jack said, content to fall back on the same comment yet again. “Obviously you were just speaking with him, as it surely wouldn’t have taken you so long to see he was not there. That means he’s counting on me just going away. Please go back and tell him that I am not leaving until I talk with him, and I will be waiting right over there.” Jack pointed to a modern couch off to the side. He then proceeded to walk to it and sit down. Placing his jacket next to him, he smiled back at the secretary.

For a moment the woman stood frozen in place, neither sitting back down at her desk nor returning inside the inner office. She had a confused and embarrassed look on her face, presumably from being caught in a flat-out lie. Eventually, she recovered, and she disappeared back into the inner sanctum for another ten seconds.

Picking up a magazine on hospital administration, as it was the only choice, Jack absently flipped through it. It was mostly advertisements. When the secretary reemerged, she made it a point to not even look at Jack, but rather went to her desk and recommenced her transcription efforts.

Jack looked at his watch. It was 12:48 P.M., which explained to him why he was hungry. He wished he’d taken the time to get some takeout from the coffee shop on his arrival, as his stomach was complaining. But he’d made up his mind. He wasn’t going to move until Ted emerged.

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how Jack looked at what ended up happening — Ted did not appear. Instead a group of four rather large, serious-looking, spiffily uniformed Asian security guards suddenly materialized. Jack had not seen them coming, as he was desperate enough to be actually reading an article about the economics of running an outpatient clinic. He became aware only after they had silently congregated in a semicircle in front of him. They were all youthful, trim of figure, and athletic-looking. All of them wore sunglasses. There were no smiles. It was a humorless, no-nonsense quartet.

In contrast to most hospital security personnel with whom Jack was familiar, these men were armed with holstered sidearms. As Jack was later to learn, they were part of the detail tasked with providing the security around GeneRx and the Farm, not part of the regular hospital security team.

“We would like you to come with us,” the guard with three stripes on his epaulets said. He had no accent. His colleagues had either one or two stripes. He was clearly the leader.

“Sorry,” Jack said. “I’m waiting to speak with Dr. Markham.”

“That is not going to happen. Stand up!” the guard said. There was no inflection in his voice. It was clearly an order. “We are here to escort you.”

“Escort me to where?” Jack said. He had the impression he was about to be forcibly deported back to New York City. With the sense of having been used vis-à-vis the autopsy and then summarily discarded, he felt his anger begin to rekindle.

“I was told to accompany you to Dr. Wei Zhao’s home,” the guard said.

“Oh, well, then. How apropos,” Jack commented. Apparently, he wouldn’t need Ted’s help in getting to Zhao after all. He started to get up but then hesitated. All at once the guard’s wording struck a chord. It sounded as if it had been an order, which evoked a reflexive pushback. Jack felt as if he’d been ordered around much too much of late, culminating in his administrative leave.

“If this is for another luncheon, I think I’ll pass,” Jack said superciliously. He reclaimed his seat and pretended to go back to his reading.

The guard barked a few orders in what again sounded to Jack like Mandarin. Jack was aware of a series of snapping noises, which he realized were the other three guards unsnapping the tabs holding their sidearms in their holsters. He then heard a jingling, and when he looked up the chief guard was clutching a pair of handcuffs. When Jack looked at the other three guards he saw they were all holding on to the butts of their holstered weapons. He got the message. These guys were not fooling around. Worse yet, facing these guards was bringing back last night’s shooting episode in searing detail, a memory Jack was trying his best to avoid thinking about.

“Stand up!” the guard said. “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

Jack nervously glanced at the eight unblinking eyes boring into him. He stood and did as he was told. If it had been one security person, he might not have been so amenable. But four was an overwhelming force. “This seems like a major overreaction,” Jack said. He winced as the handcuffs were applied.

The guard then forcibly gripped Jack’s left upper arm and urged him forward. One of the other guards picked up his jacket. As a group, they marched the length of the crowded clinic. Patients waiting to be seen glanced up at him. He wondered what they were thinking. He thought of some great comments — “This is what they do here if you don’t pay your deductible on time” — but he didn’t say anything. It was all rather embarrassing.

The final indignity was that they didn’t use the regular elevator. They marched him down to the freight elevator, which they used to get to the basement and a freight dock at the rear of the building. There they had yet another black Suburban. Jack was put in the backseat between two of the lower-ranked guards. The chief guard got in the front passenger seat, and the fourth man drove. It was all very sober. No one spoke.