Syndrome - Thomas Hoover (best summer books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Thomas Hoover
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“Maybe I thought it was your place to come to me,” Stone said, puzzled by the left turn the conversation had suddenly taken. “You know, I have a life of my own. I have an eleven-year-old daughter you’ve never seen or-apparently-care to see. I’m wondering what that says about you. Your granddaughter’s name, by the way, is—”
“I know her name. I know quite a bit about our blood ties, or lack of.”
“Well, I’d bet she’d be just thrilled by that. Incidentally, she doesn’t know a goddam thing about you and I’d just as soon keep it that way.”
“I knew having this conversation was a fucking mistake. This is why I never had it. Any real son of mine has got to have some of my character, my stature. You’re a bean counter.”
“If you had any character, you wouldn’t be hiding behind all this secrecy. I try to tell the truth, as much and as often as I can. That’s my take on character.”
“What we’re doing at Gerex is going to change the history of the world. We’re at the brink of things mankind has only dreamed about. And I’ve taken all the risks. In fact, I took the biggest risk of all personally. There’s a lot going on that you don’t know a damned thing about. We’re on the edge of—”
“All the more reason you should want the whole story told,” Stone interjected. “Yes, stem cell technology is going to change everything, but you can’t just tell half the story. I want it to work, but I’m a truth seeker. I want to find out what, if anything, can go wrong too. You’ve been using people, first Kristen and now-I’m beginning to fear-Ally, to take your risks for you. I mean, what’s going on? Why did you send somebody down to obliterate all evidence of Kristen? And now Cindy, that girl downstairs? My God, she’s somehow vanished too. Whatever happened to Kristen to make it come to this?”
“What may or may not have gone wrong is nothing that can’t be made right. No great medical advance ever succeeded in a direct line.”
“I don’t need the sales pitch,” Stone said. “I agree it’s going to revolutionize medicine. But you can’t—”
“That’s why you’ll never be a son of mine. You always think small. This is about more than mere medicine. It’s about doing the one thing mankind has never been able to do. I am this close. Nothing is going to be allowed to destroy this chance. Not even you, my own flesh and blood.”
“Am I that?” Stone asked, feeling an unexpected satisfaction. “Your own ‘flesh and blood’?”
“That is something,” Bartlett said, “we are about to discover. Whether we are made of the same thing. The best way for you to understand what’s going on here is to do what I’ve done. Have the Beta procedure. Show me you’ve got the balls.”
“The ‘Beta procedure’? It might help if I knew what it is.”
“Why don’t I just show you,” Bartlett said. “You want to be on the inside, see everything up close? Fine. I think the time has come. You seem determined to stick your nose into what I’m doing. You weaseled your way into the institute, and now you show up here. So I guess it’s time you were an insider all the way.”
“Good, maybe then I can start getting some answers. For example, was changing Kristen’s name part of the NIH study?” Stone turned to face him. “Or is it your way to hide one of your mistakes?”
“Quite frankly, that’s none of your goddam business.”
“Well, let me tell you what is my business. Ally Hampton is a particular friend of mine. I damned well want to know whether she’s scheduled to undergo the same procedure as Kristen. I don’t know what you and Van de Vliet did to Kristen, but if you turn Ally into a zombie too, I’ll personally—”
“I think we’ll continue this discussion later.” He pulled his cell phone out of a jacket pocket, flipped it open, and punched a memory number.
“Ken, could you and Jake please come in. We have the problem I was afraid we had.” He flipped the phone shut and turned back to Stone. “Karl entered Ms. Hampton and her mother into the clinical trials at the last minute, as a special favor. She’s in no danger.”
Now Stone saw two men come through the front door. One was the tall Japanese man who had slugged him the day before.
Shit. I need this? Is he going to work me over again?
The other guy was dressed in white, as though he were an orderly or nurse. Stone noticed he had a plastic syringe in his right hand.
“Ken, could you and Jake please take care of this. He’ll be going with us.”
Stone examined the three of them. Well, he thought, / guess I’m going to be back inside the Dorian Institute after all.
“Look, there’s no need for excessive violence here. We could just set some ground rules for this situation.”
The Japanese man named Ken walked over and seized him around the neck, while at the same time pulling his right arm around behind him, a decisive hammerlock.
“You fucker,” Stone choked out. “Let—” The man Bartlett had called Jake, the one in white, shoved a needle into his arm.
“This could be the experience you’ve been looking for,” Bartlett said. “You’ve been pursuing me like a dog chasing a car. Now we’re about to see if you’re man enough to handle the consequences when you’ve caught it.”
You’re damned right I’ll handle it, he tried to say. But he wasn’t sure if he actually got it said, the void was closing in so fast.
Thursday, April 9
10:33 P.M.
“Grant, is that you?”
Ally squinted in the semi-dark of the room, finally making out the silhouette. He was sitting in a chair beside her bed, and his face was troubled, reminding her of when he’d had a bad day in high school.
Am I dreaming again? she puzzled. The clock on the wall told her that this was a late hour for whatever he was up to now.
“It’s me,” he said, his voice low, just above a whisper. The door behind him, she noticed, was shut. “Welcome back to the world. They moved you upstairs just for tonight. This is the first chance I’ve had to get near you.”
She was still wondering where she was, what day it was. The walls were an icy blue, illuminated only by the silver-and-green glow of the bank of CRT screens that now monitored her heart and her respiration. She lifted her head off the pillow and for a moment, looked past Grant, examining the screen of the heart monitor. It was a phonocardiogram.
She knew what to look for. Over the years she’d learned to interpret every irregular pulse, every errant amplitude, but now the sonic abnormalities that typically characterized her stenosis, the struggle of her heart’s scarred valve to maintain adequate coronary output, were significantly damped.
There’d always been murmurs, abnormal heart sounds, as long as she could remember, so what did this mean? Had the damaged valve already begun restoring and strengthening itself? While she slept?
Or was this just more of some dream?
Why was she in this hospital anyway, hooked up to monitors? She still couldn’t remember exactly.
“What…?” She tried to rise up out of the bed. Again she wondered, was Grant real or some chimera?
Then she realized she was strapped in, though the straps were held only with black Velcro.
As she started to pull them open, she noticed she had an IV needle in her arm, with a plastic tube that led to a bag of liquid suspended from a hook above her head. More annoying, however, was the checkerboard of taped-on sensors on her upper body, for the ongoing phonocardiogram. She looked at all the tubes and connected wires and felt like a laboratory animal in the middle of an experiment.
“Ally, you’re at the Dorian Institute, remember? Dr. Van de Vliet’s stem cell clinical trials. Nina’s here too.”
“Oh.” That rang a bell, sort of. “What… what day is it?”
He told her. “You’ve been under sedation since late yesterday, Ally. But Dr. Vee says your test data show you’re responding—”
“Mom’s here, right?” Now things were starting to come back. “How’s she doing? Is she—”
“He’s talking about discharging her by the end of next week, even before the NIH clinical trials are officially over.” Grant tried a smile. “By then, he thinks the procedure will have replaced enough tissue in her brain that she might not even need a caregiver. She’s doing crosswords again. Need I say more.”
“My God.” Now she remembered how on-again, off-again Nina’s mind had been when she brought her out to the institute. Had she really been given a second chance? And so quickly? If so, it was truly astonishing.
But now she found herself staring at Grant, mesmerized. Something about him seemed oddly off.
“Grant, what… what’s going on with you?”
“I’ve…” He was hesitating. “I’ve been thinking about everything. Now I really wish I hadn’t done what I did.”
“What are you talking about?” This kind of revisionist remorse didn’t sound like the Grant she knew.
“Have you seen Kristen? They said you know about her, were asking about her.” Then he stepped back. “Do you know about her?”
Kristen. She tried to remember. Is that the woman everybody… Her mother had come to the institute with a pistol trying to find her? Then she was kidnapped….
“It’s the Syndrome,” Grant went on. “She wanted the Beta procedure, and Dr. Vee finally agreed. But nobody expected anything to happen like what eventually did. That’s why W.B. went ahead and had it too.”
Beta. Now she remembered that Kristen had mumbled something about that word.
“Ally, I got you into… When I told W. B. that I thought you and he had the same rare blood type, AB, he wanted to bring you into the program.”
“You mean for my heart?”
He looked away and his eyes grew pained. “Well, that’s part of it. There’s another part they haven’t told you about.”
“What’s that?”
“Antibodies. They think there’s a chance you could be made to develop them and then they could use them to help W.B. He doesn’t have the Syndrome yet, but it’s probably just a matter of time.”
What, she puzzled, is he talking about? What “antibodies “? What “syndrome “? She was weak and she wasn’t sure her mind was fully functional. But after what appeared to be the miracle of her heart, she was willing to forsake a certain amount of momentary rationality.
Then more memory started returning. “Kristen. What about her? I saw—”
“Ally, the Syndrome started with her over four months ago. At first they didn’t fully realize how serious… but now it’s getting worse every day.” He paused and turned away. “Look, I’ve been thinking. I’m really sorry that I brought you into this. What if something goes wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you could see Kristen now, you’d understand.”
“Where is she? Is she still wherever they’re hiding her?”
“No.” He turned back. “Kristen… After what happened yesterday, she had to be brought back out here. There’s a ward downstairs, on the floor below the offices and lab, that’s kind of like an intensive-care unit. That’s where you were until tonight. But you can’t go back down there on your own. Not even the nurses can go without a special authorization, which
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