Syndrome - Thomas Hoover (best summer books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Thomas Hoover
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“I was talking to the Dutch guy late last week,” he went on, picking up a faint positive vibe and hoping desperately he could build on it, “and he said he’s looking for someone in their thirties with a rheumatic-heart thing-I think it’s like what you have-to be part of this big clinical trial they’re wrapping up. But they have to do it immediately, so they can put the data in their final report to the National Institutes of Health.”
“And you thought about me? That’s very touching, Grant. Your idea of doing me a favor is to let some Dutch quack experiment on me?”
“Hey, don’t be so fast to turn up your nose at this.” Shit, he thought, how am I going to make any headway? “His procedure operates at the cell level. The way they say it works is he takes cells from your bone marrow or blood or… whatever and makes them ‘immortal’ with this special enzyme and then injects them into organ tissue. It causes that organ to start regenerating itself.”
“That sounds completely like science fiction. Besides, I’m not—”
“Well, he’s doing it. Trust me. But there’re only a couple of weeks left in the clinical trials, so everything’s on a fast track now. If you’re the least bit interested, you’ve got to call him tomorrow. If you don’t, I’m sure he’ll find somebody else by the middle of the week.”
He reached down and tried to give Knickers a pat, but she drew away. Good for her, Ally thought. Then he looked up and his voice grew animated. “Ally, the Dutch doctor-his name is Van de Vliet, by the way-is the smartest man I’ve ever met. I’d say he’s a good bet for the Nobel Prize in Medicine this time next year. I’d put my last dime on it. What he’s doing is so incredible I shouldn’t even be talking about it. At least not till the clinical trials are finished. But I wanted to do you this favor.”
Uh-huh, she thought. What it amounted to was, he was coming to her with another one of his hustles. Probably they needed somebody to round out their clinical trials and she was conveniently handy. “You know, Grant, maybe I’ll just pass. I already have a cardiologist.”
She found herself wondering what Dr. Ekelman would say to this radical new treatment.
“All right, Ally, do you want to make me beg? I need you to do this. When I described you to Dr. Van de Vliet, I could tell he was very excited. This could change everything for you.” He paused, perhaps becoming aware of the pleading tone in his voice. “For chrissake, give me a break. Is there someplace we can have coffee? I’m not asking to come upstairs or anything. I just want to see if we can be on speaking terms long enough to help each other out.”
In a way she was relieved though she was secretly hurt all over again too. He wasn’t crawling back to her to beg forgiveness for destroying lives. No, he was back and groveling because he thought she could help him butter up his boss. How could she not feel used?
God, that was so like him. At that moment she knew there was never any chance he’d change.
“Come on,” he said again. “A lousy cup of coffee. There’s that little French bistro on Hudson Street.” He tried a grin. “Hey, I’ll even buy.”
For a moment she thought she felt her resolve slipping. It’s funny, but after you break up a family, no matter how dysfunctional, you start repressing the bad memories. But then something comes along to remind you all over again.
“Grant, are you hearing yourself?” She stared at him. “You sound like you’re selling snake oil.”
“Why was I afraid you’d back off? You’re really doing it because you’re pissed. Okay, you’ve got a right. But I’ve brought you something I think you ought to at least look at.” He was unzipping his fanny pack and taking out a Gerex Corporation envelope, folded in half.
Christ, he thought miserably, why is she doing this to me? I’ve got to keep the door open.
“Read this and then give me a call tonight, like you promised. It’ll tell you more about him.”
She hesitated before taking it. It was thick with papers and she was planning to spend the day visiting Nina. “I think I’ve heard enough already.”
“Just look at his CV. Van de Vliet’s. He’s done a lot of things. You’ve got to take him seriously.” He urged it into her hand. “Look at it and call me. Please.”
She took it, and then she reached down and patted Knickers. “Come on, baby. Let’s go up.”
He watched her disappear into the lobby and start shooting the breeze with the doorman, some red-haired jerk with a ponytail who’d just come on duty.
Damn. Maybe the best thing would be just to chloroform her and let her wake up in the lab. W.B. needs her.
Sunday, April 5
8:20 A.M.
“Okay, you’d better take it from here,” Winston Bartlett declared to Kenji Noda over the roar of the engine. He had lifted his feet off the pedals and was unbuckling the cockpit seat belt. He liked having a turn piloting his McDonnell Douglas 520N helicopter on the commutes between his corporate headquarters in Lower Manhattan and his medical research park in northern New Jersey, but prudence dictated a more experienced hand on the collective during descent and landing. For that he had Noda, formerly of the Japanese Defense Forces. A tall, wiry man of few words, Noda was also his bodyguard, chauffeur, and curator of his museum-quality katana sword collection.
With the sharp, delicious aroma of the pine forest below wafting through the cabin, Noda quickly put aside the origami he’d been folding, to center his mind and slid around a special opening in the bulkhead. He strapped himself into the seat, then took the radio headphones. The sky was the purest blue, with not another craft in the visual perimeter. They were, after all, over a forest.
As Bartlett settled himself in the passenger compartment, he thought about where matters stood. There was the very real prospect he had rolled the dice one time too many. The daily blood tests at his clinic in New Jersey were showing he was disturbingly close to using up his nine lives.
To look at him, though, you’d never suspect. At sixty-seven he was still trim and athletic, confident even cocky, with a full head of steel dark hair and probing eyes that instantly appraised whatever they caught in their gaze. He played handball at a private health club near his Gramercy Park mansion for an hour every other morning and he routinely defeated men half his age, including Grant Hampton. Remaining a player in every sense of the term was the main reason he enjoyed flying his M-D chopper, even though his license had been lapsed for eight years. It was the perfect embodiment of his lust for life. As he never failed to point out, his lifelong business success wasn’t bad for a City College grad with a bachelor’s degree in Oriental art history. He had gotten this far because he wanted success enough to make it happen.
He’d started out in New York real estate, but for the last twenty years he had concentrated on buying up small, under-priced medical-device manufacturers with valuable patents and weak bottom lines. He dismantled some of the companies and sold off the pieces, always for more than he’d paid for the whole. Others he restructured with new management, and when a profitable turnaround was in sight, he took them public or sold them to a major player like Johnson & Johnson. The potential winners, though, the ones with promising pipelines of medical devices or drugs whose FDA approval was imminent, he relocated here at the BMD campus in northern New Jersey.
But competition was fierce, and the bigger players like Merck and J&J had limitless research capital. They could write off dead ends a lot easier. Thus it was that five years ago, when his pipeline was drying up, Winston Bartlett took the biggest gamble of his life. He acquired a cash-strapped new start-up called the Gerex Corporation, whose head scientist was at the cutting edge of stem cell research. Karl Van de Vliet, M.D., Ph.D., had just had his funding terminated and his laboratory at Stanford University closed after a political flap by right-wingers.
Bartlett had moved Van de Vliet here to New Jersey and poured millions into his stem cell efforts, bleeding BMD’s working capital white and racking up 85 million in short-term debt just to keep the rest of the company afloat. Now, though, the gamble was paying off. This month Gerex was winding up stage-three clinical trials for the National Institutes of Health. These trials validated a revolutionary procedure that changed the rules of everything known about healing the human body. Already his CFO, Grant Hampton, was heading a negotiating team hammering out a deal with the British biotech conglomerate Cambridge Pharmaceuticals to sell them a 49 percent stake in Gerex. Over 650 million in cash and stock were on the table, and there were escalators, depending on the results of the trials now under way.
The problem was, Cambridge had only seen the financial and summaries of data from Gerex’s successful clinical trials. They knew nothing about the fiasco of the Beta procedure.
“Karl called just before we left and said she’s worse this morning,” Bartlett remarked to Noda. He was removing his aviator shades and there was deep frustration in his eyes. “God I feel so damned responsible. She was—”
“Having the Beta was Kristen’s idea,” Noda reminded him. “She wanted to do it.”
What he didn’t say was on both their minds: what about Bartlett himself? After Kristen Starr had had the Beta, and it had seemed successful, Bartlett decided to have it too. Now his daily blood tests here at the institute were showing that the telomerase enzyme was starting to metastasize and replicate in his bloodstream, just as it had in hers.
“Well,” Bartlett went on, “Karl thinks he’s got a new idea that might save us. Hampton is supposed to be on the case this very morning.” He stared out the chopper’s window, down at the rooftops of his empire. At the north end of the industrial park was the main laboratory, where stents and titanium joint replacements were tested on animals-mostly sterile pigs, though some primate testing also was under way. The central area had two large manufacturing facilities where the more complex devices were made.
The buildings were all white cinder block, except for the one they were hovering above now. It was at the far south end, a massive three-story mansion nestled among ancient pines and reached by a long cobblestone driveway. Though it was actually the oldest building of the group by a hundred years, it was the latest acquisition for the complex. It fronted a beautiful ten-acre lake, and had been a summer palacio of a nineteenth-century railroad baron. Around mid-century it was turned into a luxury retirement home, complete with nursing services. Its ornate appointments reminded patients of the Frick Gallery, if one could imagine those marble halls teeming with wheelchairs and nurses.
Bartlett had bought the defunct manufacturing complex next to it eighteen years earlier for the BMD industrial park, but it was only six years ago that the owners of the mansion, a group of squabbling heirs, finally relented and agreed to part with the property. It was now a flagship holding of BMD.
He had an eye for design and he had loved remodeling the old mansion and making it into a modern clinic and research facility. He had renamed it the Dorian Institute and moved in Karl Van
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