Flip

  The ambulance pulled a quick turn around and backed up toward the entrance. John had done this so many times that he didn’t even need to look at the painted guidelines to let him know he was dead on target. He stopped, killed the engine, and hopped out as someone opened the ambulance’s rear doors.

  Nat and her father stood on the apron, holding their bags and a backpack. They were both silent and a little stiff—not that the hospital staff noticed, and if they did, well, their behavior wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Given what the two of them had been through, it was amazing they were still standing at all.

  As John helped load Aida into the ambulance, the nurse looked around and asked, “Where’s your partner? There need to be two medics for a transport, especially a long one like this.”

  “She’s at station eighty-two, getting our things together. I’m gonna swing by and pick her up,” he replied, hoping the lie would work.

  “The protocol calls for two before we can let you leave. Can someone bring her over here?” she said.

  “Our gear is at the station, no sense in her hauling it all over here. It’s only five minutes away,” he said.

  “Doctor Kelley authorized this transfer himself. Is there a problem?” Greg intervened. The nurse didn’t like it, but she conceded, as this was above her level.

  John helped Greg into the back of the unit and quickly closed the doors. He told Nat to get in the front, and then he stepped around the front of the vehicle to avoid any further questions from the nurse. He climbed into the driver’s side and gave a quick chirp on the sirens to let anyone around them know they were about to roll. A moment later, they headed out of the parking lot toward the street.

  “Okay, Greg. I’m driving, but I don’t know where I’m going.” For a second, John thought that he should go to station eighty-two, which was to the right, but the last thing they needed was more questions from anyone on duty there.

  The exit to the street was only a few yards ahead, and John thought he felt the eyes of the ER staff on them. “Greg, which way am I going?” he said, louder than the first time. He saw Greg in the rearview mirror, struggling for the correct answer.

  “I don’t know. Just go anywhere. No wait! Turn left!”

  John hit the indicator just as they reached the edge of the driveway and smoothly accelerated into the street. A patrol car was stopped at a traffic light a hundred yards ahead, and he pulled up beside it slowly, knowing that the cops were sure to be out looking for drunks. It was a little after 1:00 a.m., and the bars had just closed. True, they wouldn’t be looking for a paramedic driving an ambulance under the influence; still, he didn’t want to do anything to draw the attention of the university police.

  As they sat at the light, Greg stuck his head through the narrow passageway between the driver’s compartment and the back. The light changed, and John let the patrol car pull out ahead of them.

  “Okay, Greg. Where to now?”

  “Go straight. Just keep going.”

  As they drove away from the hospital, the spacing between the streetlights increased, and darkness closed in around them. Ahead, on their side of the street, was an illuminated bus shelter with a single occupant seated on the bench. As the ambulance approached, the figure stood and stepped out as though he were waiting for a bus. He raised his hand and turned to face the oncoming headlights.

  “That’s him. That’s Matthew! Pick him up,” Greg said, pointing at the elderly man who was slowly waving. John pulled over to the bus stop, and Nat opened her door to let the man climb in.

  “Hello, Miss Doxiphus, Gregorio, Mr. Holden.” He greeted them, smiling. “Congratulations. It seems our little bit of subterfuge was successful. I didn’t see anyone following you out of the parking lot. Is Aida secure?”

  “She’s in the back, secured for transport,” John said.

  “I need to get in the back with your mother, if you’ll excuse me, Miss Doxiphus.”

  “Who are you?” Nat asked him as he squeezed by.

  “My apologies. My name is Matthew. My fellow monks and I are doing everything we can to help your mother. One of the reasons I came is that I’m a licensed doctor of traditional Eastern medicine.”

  John pulled away from the bus stop. “Okay, Matthew. Where to?” he asked, hopeful he’d have solid directions to follow.

  “Head toward the interstate and get on I-80 west, if you would, Mr. Holden. We’re going to New Mexico.”

  10 Confirmation

  A steady rain fell with a soft tak-tak-tak on the office windows. Another in an endless train of Pacific storms was blowing through. The weather people called it “The Pineapple Express.” Basically, warm tropical moisture streamed across the Pacific from Hawaii and then was dumped on the whole Puget Sound area. This summer was already on track to be the wettest on record. He hated it, but it did make certain aspects of their operation easier to accomplish.

  At an angle, Jerome Gilden saw his reflection in the darkened floor-to-ceiling windows that wrapped around the exterior wall and wondered if he could be seen from the outside. He didn’t like being publicly visible. He detested exposure; it was too much of a risk. For the umpteenth time, he wished there were curtains he could pull shut. He glanced at the controls for the adaptive windows and saw they were on the opaque setting. This damn high-tech building was going to drive him to distraction.

  “Don’t worry about it, muh boy,” he reassured himself aloud, then continued silently. There’s nothing around here for twenty miles except mountains, hills, and trees. It’s going on eleven p.m., and there’s a heavy storm outside; no one’s watching.

  He swiveled his high-backed executive chair away from the windows, back to the mahogany monstrosity that was his desk, blocking any chance anyone outside among the trees of Pacific County might have had of spying him.

  Gilden’s desk phone warbled, breaking the silence. He leaned over and hit the speaker icon on the touchscreen.

  “Did he agree to the transfer? Is she on her way here?” he asked, leaning back in the chair.

  “Well, hello to you too,” came a woman’s voice from the other end. “And no, he hasn’t yet. He’s pretty wrung out and couldn’t decide right away. He asked for a little time. He’ll tell us in the morning.”

  “And if he doesn’t want to move her?”

  “He will. He’s very logical. This is the best thing for her, and he knows it. He just needs a few hours to work it through.”

  “What’s plan B?” Gilden asked, allowing a little of his irritation to come through.

  “Plan B is Kelley. He wants to minimize the attention this whole situation is drawing to the university. It’s grant-renewal time, and NIH reviewers are here. He already said he’d authorize the transfer if Greg doesn’t.”

  “Okay, that’s good for now. How are you doing?” he said, switching to a more congenial tone.

  “I’m in the doctors’ residence at the hospital, going through Aida’s records. It’s fascinating. Her traces are nearly identical to those of our observers.”

  He checked the bottom right-hand corner of the touchscreen and saw the little padlock icon was on, indicating this call was encrypted and secure.

  “Let’s talk about that more when you all get here. I’m preparing a special welcome for you,” Gilden said, trying to be charming. “How long until you arrive?”

  “Well, it’s a little before one a.m. here. Kelley will authorize the transfer in six or seven hours at the latest. Then there’s an hour to prep and drive to the airport and transfer her, three hours for the flight, and then ground transport there. We should be back in time for lunch.”

  “Excellent,” Gilden said with a genuine smile this time. “I’ll make sure the hospitality suite is ready for them. We’ll give the husband and daughter a warm welcome and provide them with all the support they need.”

  “And then?”

  “Do you really want to have this conversation now, Beverly?” he replied. Gilden leaned across the desk, his voic
e dropping all pretense of pleasantry. The message was made all the more threatening for the velvet smoothness in which it was delivered. “This is business. The Project needs to understand what’s going on here so it can be controlled and duplicated.”

  “They’re colleagues of mine,” she spat back, then caught herself. “The university will be watching.”

  “Like I said, we’ll keep them happy here, learn everything we can from her, then kick them loose when we’re done.” He paused, allowing the opportunity for any other objections, but he expected silence, and he got it. “We need you all here as soon as possible. Be careful,” he said, then hung up.

  11 Aida’s Day

  P eace and comfort. Aida existed in nothing but peace and comfort. She was still asleep enough to be floating in her dreams and just awake enough to appreciate how wonderful it felt. Something beautiful wanted her attention; a gentle tug pulled her to the bank of the stream in which she was drifting. A gliding flute made a simple statement of four descending notes, which then reversed and repeated, climbing up, then going down again. Wow, Morning Mood, I love this piece, was her first thought of the day. She normally would hit the snooze button but decided to let Edvard Grieg’s famous piece play on.

  The sun was just rising, with beams of light revealing the lighter colors in the dark wood of their Mediterranean-style furniture. Out of habit, Aida’s hand drifted over to Greg’s side of the bed, but she only felt the pillows she had stacked up there to occupy his space. He’s still at Fermilab, she remembered, now coming fully awake.

  She pictured him there, in the middle of the work he loved, and was happy for him. He’ll be back in a few days, she thought as she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She reached high in a stretch, inhaling the noticeably cooler and dryer morning air, and lightly rose from the bed. It was one of those rare mornings when she woke up just ahead of the alarm clock and was full of energy.

  Aida’s morning routine went faster than usual, and she got downstairs at ten after six, dressed in a simple tan skirt and white blouse. Breakfast was likewise simple: a cup of coffee and Greek yogurt with fruit and nuts. She gathered her things and, checking her watch, saw she was out the door at 6:25 a.m. In the front garden, the sun angled through the stargazer lilies, which were just blossoming, and their sweet, rich aroma made her smile. She loved this time of year, and today seemed to hold its own particular promise.

  She arrived at building 87 a few minutes early, despite a detour that was being set up on University Drive South. She had caught all the lights on the way, which was weird, but God was smiling on her today, so she decided to just be grateful. She unlocked the door and went into her lab. The lab benches stood like low monoliths, gray in the shadows cast by the building across the street. As she walked around the benches to the left, her attention was drawn to the pale-blue sky subtly reflected off the linoleum floor. She flicked on the light in her office, put her purse in a desk drawer, and slipped on her well-worn lab coat. She had scheduled a calibration run of the TMS/TDS machine at seven fifteen, so she still had a few minutes to check her email. She knocked on the space bar twice as if to say, “Wake up” to the computer, then settled in to finish her morning ritual.

  Right at seven, she heard Bill come into the lab. When he stopped at his desk, Aida heard the usual thud of a dropped backpack and the jingle of tossed keys. He’s on time today. That’s unusual.

  “Hey, Dr. D. G’morning. I’m gonna grab some coffee. You want anything?”

  Bill has his rituals too. “Good morning, Bill. No, thanks,” she said, swiveling her chair to see him.

  He was wearing his usual T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. His wavy brown hair was disheveled and looked as though he had only run his hands through it. At thirty-five, he should’ve started dressing more age appropriate years ago, she thought, but he had no partner that she knew of, and he was more than a little socially awkward, even for a lab tech. In fact, offering to get her coffee was remarkably uncharacteristic of him. Hmm, punctual and considerate today.

  “Calibration run at seven fifteen, right?” Bill asked.

  “Yes, first run with the new detectors. Very exciting!”

  “Cool!” he said, bobbing his head once to emphasize just how cool he thought this was.

  Aida and Greg had finished building and installing the new detectors, called quantum evoked subatomic magnetometers, or QUESAMs, right before he had left for Chicago. The QUESAMs were three generations ahead of the spin exchange relaxation-free (SERF) magnetometers that had come out of Princeton in the 2000s and perhaps a dozen ahead of the cryogenically cooled superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) that were initially developed at the Ford Research labs in the 1960s. These ultra-sensitive devices could sense the minute magnetic fields created by individual neurons in the brain and identify the exact location of any given neuron at the same time. What made them truly special, however, was their temporal resolution, which was down to the nanosecond, the same resolution as the NIST atomic clocks. If it worked as designed, the QUESAM device could show the electromagnetic state and exact location of every individual nerve cell in the brain at any one-billionth, or 10-9 second, window of time. It would be like filming all the activity in the brain, from the smallest level on up, with a super-high-speed camera. With this, they could start to produce a detailed map of human cognition. And that was only the beginning; this was the first stepping stone on the path to Aida’s real goal.

  If we get this to work, she thought, no one will have to suffer like Mom ever again.

  Her mother’s brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme, hadn’t just been the cause of her excruciating suffering and subsequent death; it had slowly, over the fourteen months from diagnosis to death, destroyed who her mother was. It had tortured the woman and, with insidious intent, murdered her identity and sense of self.

  The first symptoms had been headaches and sensitivity to light. Then came the nausea and vomiting and double vision. The doctors discovered a very aggressive tumor growing in the back of her brain, in the occipital lobe, which explained the disturbance of the visual field. The chemo and radiation therapy barely slowed it down, and then in the course of the surgery, the parts of the visual center of the brain that hadn’t been infiltrated, crushed, or corrupted by the cancer were removed in an effort to get “a clean border.”

  And then Mom went blind.

  They thought they’d gotten it all, and Aida’s mother had started to recover. That had been a hopeful month. But glioblastoma multiforme is particularly hardy. If only a handful of cells, perhaps only as few as ten, survive the therapies, they start dividing and growing again. Worse, they can infiltrate healthy cells, alter their DNA, and convert them to pluripotent stem cells, which then, under the influence of the cancer cells, become glioblastoma multiforme cells themselves.

  And so it spread, a suicidal parasite bent on its own survival for as long as the host could support it. It nested in the midline of the brain, right in the hippocampus, and then her memory was gone.

  Every bit of her that I knew ended then.

  In her office, Aida’s eyes stayed dry; she had exhausted that fountain many years ago. But it had been replaced with a single-minded determination to fight this thing and, through that struggle, to ease the suffering of others who would inevitably follow that same path.

  “Ready to go, Dr. D? I’m gonna run the setup now if you’re ready,” said Bill, looking at her with concern. In her reverie she had missed him coming back in.

  “Absolutely. Let’s get going.” Let’s kill this damn thing.

  ***

  “Ready for your login, Dr. D,” Bill said as Aida stepped into the outer room of the double-shelled stim room complex. Bill had full administrator access to the computers and was already logged in at the operating-system level. But the control program for the machine required a second login. It was an annoying security feature that Greg had insisted on to keep their work secure, and after some debate, she admitted it
was probably the right thing to do.

  Aida had heard stories of work being sabotaged by peers, especially around grant-review time, but she was a trusting soul and couldn’t bring herself to think of anyone she knew deliberately wrecking work that would save lives. Still, hackers were out there everywhere, and competition for funding was brutal. On top of that, there were potential defense applications to their work. Greg had won the security debate by reminding her of the Gang Lu incident during her medical residency at the University of Iowa on November 1, 1991. The papers said Lu was disgruntled over losing some prize. But he also was a foreign national studying particle physics who killed the four faculty members working on Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, otherwise known as the Star Wars program. You could never know who was going to snap or what their motivations were.

  “Sure. Let me drive,” Aida said, motioning Bill out of the chair in front of the console.

  He smiled at her and practically jumped out of the chair. “Right. Sorry. Here you go.”

  He’s eager to please today, she thought as they squeezed past each other.

  This second layer of security was little more than a simple username and password. A standard username and password verified your identity based on something you knew. You typed in those things you knew, and the system would let you in or not based on what it knew those things to be. A more secure login would require you to provide something you know and something you have and something you are. For example, your username and password (something you know), a smartcard with an embedded chip (something you have), and a fingerprint or retinal scan (something you are). The most secure systems required all three and from multiple people. But Greg hadn’t insisted on going that far.