At the bottom of each page was a signature, one I knew as well as my own. It consisted of little more than a looping A and C. Alaine Chen.
Damn it, Alaine, I thought.
The final file in the box was marked “JM–Termination.” The first page contained in it was frightening for its simplicity: diagnosis was, as Falk had said, listed as a nosocomial staph infection. But it was the note at the bottom of the page that shocked me. “Discontinue antibiotic treatment as per protocol.” The date listed was nearly a year before. The paper was signed by Otto Falk.
Janet Margulies. Most likely the patient from Room Three in the hospital, who, by all appearances, had died of a run-of-the mill staph infection. But then, why had they discontinued antibiotic treatment? And why had the file been marked “Termination”? You don’t terminate a person with an infection.
An enormous red flag began to wave in my head. If you were intent on killing someone in the hospital, especially one who was brain-dead, introducing a staph infection might just be the way to do it. It would be expected that someone in Janet Margulies’s condition could pick up the bug. Her dying of staph would not raise undue scrutiny.
But why would Otto Falk have wanted her dead?
I thought about that, playing things over in my head. They might want her dead if she was sick, but the surveillance seemed to indicate she was clean. So, what could have changed? There was the rape, of course. . . .
“Shit,” I hissed.
Quickly, I rifled through the pages, through the catalog of Janet Margulies’s biological history. I wanted lab tests this time, and someone had been kind enough to make a file called “JM–Labs.” It was filled with a hundred pages of computer printouts detailing electrolytes, creatinine levels for kidney function, liver enzymes. I searched for dates near the one displayed on the videotape from Dr. Tobel. Finally, I found what I was looking for: a new test that had been added. Beta hCG, or beta human chorionic gonadotropin. The stuff of pregnancy tests.
Negative: 4/16, 4/23, 4/30, 5/7. Negative: 5/14, 5/21. Positive: 5/28.
Janet Margulies had become pregnant.
I cross-checked the dates. Four days after the first positive pregnancy test, Janet develops a nosocomial staph infection. Otto Falk decides not to treat, “as per protocol.” Janet Margulies dies.
Gotcha.
CHAPTER 84
Okay, a glimmer of narrative began to shine. First, the rape. Following this sexual unpleasantness, the victim, Janet Margulies, becomes pregnant and is “terminated.” Kincaid disappears; reappears as Douglas Buchanan. Buchanan dies, his organs stripped from him. And though I’m a consumer of sordid media just like any other good American, I did not think it was devil worshippers or psychos with a taste for human viscera who killed him. Nor did I think his murder was related to the pregnancy per se. I thought someone took his organs because they were looking for the same thing I was: whatever killed Debbie Fillmore, Bethany Reginald, Bryan Tinings.
But that means they thought Kincaid—a.k.a. Douglas Buchanan—was sick. And the most likely chain of infection—Abby the pig ’ Janet the brain-dead ’ Kincaid the naughty—was missing too many links. For example, Janet Margulies was killed because she was pregnant, not because she was sick. Or was she sick? If so, why no documentation? If so, if they were worried that Kincaid had picked something up while raping the poor woman, then why let him go east?
Because they didn’t think Janet was diseased, and therefore they didn’t think Kincaid was diseased.
But they did think Kincaid was sick, ergo the missing innards. So let’s assume that’s true, let’s assume it’s a timing issue: sometime after the rape and before his murder, people became worried Kincaid carried a virus. If that’s the case, then here’s the big question: If it wasn’t a PERV, if it wasn’t one of the dozen bugs they were actively monitoring, then what the hell was it? And was this mysterious “it” the same thing that slaughtered poor Debbie Fillmore?
Damn it, I was missing something. Okay, maybe not something, maybe a lot of things. And I was getting tangled up in the logical inconsistencies. But despite the circumstances, I was in a glass-half-full mood then.
I realized that I had the first real evidence to interest law enforcement. Although feeble, it was my first toehold, and it would mean Messrs. Falk and Carrington would have a lot to explain. But I needed more, something admissible and truly damning. Another videotape would be nice. Maybe Falk and Carrington carrying on about how killing Janet Margulies and Kincaid Falk and Gladys Thomas was necessary because of all the good the docs were disgorging into the world. All this while they were snorting cocaine off the bare midriffs of ten-year-olds. That would be nice.
All right, fantasy time was over, and I had to admit I was freaked. It didn’t take an MD to know that for people with so much at risk, one dead CDC officer was a small price to pay. These people had already proved what they were capable of, and I was down here alone—
Not alone.
I heard noises. They were faint at first—the click of a door, a few voices. Then, through the narrow window in the door to my small freezer room, I saw the lights flash full in the main lab. I cursed. The lights were like a goddamned beacon for anyone coming into the lab.
I shoved the files into the box and slammed it shut, dropped the Abby box back on top. There was a large freezer to the left of the door, so I skittered across to the door’s right. Someone standing outside the window looking in wouldn’t be able to see me, but if anyone so much as cracked the door, the jig would be up.
The voices. One female, at least. One male. Maybe two. Fuck it. I had no idea how many people were outside.
I was going to end up in a shallow grave somewhere near Salinas. I knew it.
With my knees pulled up to my chin, I waited. Keep calm, McCormick.
The electronic lock made a noise. My heart went crazy, and I could hear nothing but blood in my ears. I began to shake. So much for keeping calm.
The door cracked open two feet from me, and the dark eyes of Alaine Chen locked on mine. I heard her breath catch in her throat. Alaine Chen, whose name was on all those biopsy records. Alaine Chen, who—now it made sense—had given me the directions to this place, where I would be cut off from all help. I waited for her to call to whoever was with her, to sound the alarm. Instead, she stood there. She turned her head.
“Someone must have left the light on,” she said. “There’s no one here.”
She pushed the door open further. I stopped breathing.
I heard a male voice I didn’t recognize. “The computer said he used the card to get in.”
Alaine said, “Maybe he did. Now he’s gone.”
“The cameras didn’t catch him on the way out.”
“He’s a smart man.”
The male voice got closer. “He was in the freezer, Dr. Chen. The computer said so.”
“Well,” she said, “he’s not in here anymore.” Then she closed the door. The lights in the freezer room went out.
So, Alaine Chen really was in my corner. Why she was, I couldn’t say.
CHAPTER 85
Darkness. I sat in the room for a long time, put my hand up to my face, waited for my eyes to adjust. They never did. The only light I had was the illumination from my Timex. I held down the button for a moment, let it cast a green haze over the room, and let it go. Dark again. Dark was better. Safer.
Knowing I couldn’t move for a while, and knowing that sitting still would just up my anxiety, I blazed up the Timex and located the file boxes. I put Abby’s box on the floor, removed the top of JM’s. The light on the watch was too dim, and kept going out five seconds after I turned it on, but it gave me an idea and I pulled out my cell phone. After scrolling through the menu for what seemed like ten minutes. I found the function that allowed me to turn on the screen backlight. The phone warned me about high battery consumption. Ignoring it, I turned on the light.
It was just enough to see. After a few awkward minutes of paging through
JM’s files with one hand, holding the phone with the other, I found it: the page mentioning termination. I pulled it, then pulled JM’s pregnancy results. I folded both pages and put them into my pocket. Then I closed the boxes and restacked them, killed the light on my phone.
I sat.
And because I didn’t have anything else to do—except to worry about how I was going to get out of here—I did my best to think.
One thing I couldn’t figure was whether the good doctors at Chimeragen had identified a pathogen, so I tried to pump the whole factual soup of this investigation into an intellectual framework I knew pretty well: epidemiology. At first blush this might seem like something of a stretch, but take a step back. Unknowns are unknowns, and a bad guy’s a bad guy, whether he’s ten microns across or just slightly bigger, with weird glasses and a one-syllable German surname. Seriously, at its core, my training taught me how to look at the world in a certain way, how to analyze the movement of elements through a population. When you think about it this way, information is kind of like a disease. It’s a discrete thing that you either have or don’t have, it’s passed from person to person, and it’s relayed through some sort of contact. Information can be dangerous; ideas can be infectious. The metaphor, I think, is apt. And I really didn’t have much of a choice but to see it this way, since epidemiology is the lens through which I viewed the world.
Okay, if information is our disease—specifically, information about whatever virus or pathogen I was looking for—then there would be someone close to its source, the person first infected. The source itself would be a test to find the pathogen, and the index case would be the person performing the test. Here, it would be the microbiologist brought on to monitor the disease.
Harriet Tobel.
And Harriet Tobel was dead.
I checked my phone. No signal.
The lights to the lab outside were still dark, and I figured—I hoped—that Alaine and her buddy would leave this place alone long enough for me to make a call.
The door had a glow-in-the-dark safety latch, meaning I didn’t need a key card or a light to get out of the small room. Hunched over, I pushed the latch and opened the door a crack. For thirty seconds at least, I listened, and, hearing nothing but my own heart, I pushed the door the rest of the way open and skated to the far end of the room, behind a lab bench.
Two bars on the cell phone.
It was a long shot, sure, but I had an idea and needed to get things moving. I dialed.
“Vallo,” I said. Good, I thought, he’s still in the lab.
“Who is this?”
“Nate McCormick.”
“Great. Why are you whispering?”
“Listen, I want you to make some primers from the long sequence I sent you. That Junin-HIV thing. And I want you to run Southern blot and PCR on Debbie Fillmore with it.”
“Let me ask you a question: you know what time it is?”
“Late, I know.”
“You’re damned right it’s late. I was walking out the door, just about to leave. But the freaking phone rings and, like Pavlov’s dog, I pick it up. See what happens—?”
“Ben, cut it, okay? I don’t have time to fuck around here.”
There was a pause, Vallo shifting from the hale-fellow ball busting to something like concern. “Nate, everything all right?”
“I don’t know. This is a long shot. A real long shot, but it’s the best we have right now.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just run the tests. I’ll call you later.”
I hung up.
Okay, that was in motion.
In the silence, I sat and reflected and got scared again. On one hand, I’d found more than I ever thought I would. What seemed like unrelated events were coming together for me. This was good. On the other hand, it really seemed that there were a bunch of murderous scientists circling around me. Add to that that I had no idea in hell how I was going to get out of this mess. This was definitely bad.
I’d like to say I had a daring plan for escape, burrowing through the floor, cutting open one of the pigs and hiding in the carcass, dramatic things like that. I didn’t. I figured the place was in some sort of lock-down, and I’d be found out as soon as I tried to leave. Obviously, they could follow the movements of Harriet Tobel’s card, and follow those movements they would.
And I couldn’t stay in this room forever. They’d be through there again; I was sure of that. Alaine might have a change of mind.
So, the only thing I could think of at that point was to call for help. My car might still be on the road. If Brooke called the police, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult for them to find me. Too many ifs and mights, but it seemed like the only rational plan for a guy who definitely was not James Bond.
I dialed Brooke’s number.
The phone rang and rang.
“Damn it,” I cursed.
Just as I thought the voice mail was about to pick up, someone answered. “Hello?” Brooke said, her voice shaking.
“Brooke. Have the police come to where I am. I can get you near me. You can look for the car—”
“Get out of there—”
I heard some ruffling on the phone, Brooke saying “Get out, Nathaniel,” then another voice: “Dr. McCormick?” a male voice asked.
“Who is this?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Like hell it doesn’t—”
“Listen to me, Dr. McCormick. Your friend is with me now. She’s safe. But how safe she stays depends on you.”
I was very confused, so I said, “What are you talking about?”
“You know very well what I’m talking about. Who have you told?”
“Who have I told what?”
“Who have you called?”
“I haven’t called anybody. Who the hell are you?”
“I hope you haven’t. Listen to me, I want you in the front of the building at the farm—the main building—in fifteen minutes. If you’re not there, if you’re trying to run now, then go back.”
“Tell me—”
“If you call the police—or call anyone, for that matter—your friend will disappear. Okay? I’m going to check your cell phone call history when I get there, Dr. McCormick. If I see there are any calls after this one, or if I see you’ve erased your call history, your friend will disappear. If I see you’ve received any calls, your friend will disappear. This is a promise.”
CHAPTER 86
Stunned, I sat for a minute.
Brooke.
I backlit my cell again and fumbled around until I found the lab’s phone. I trusted the bastard about my cell, but I didn’t think they’d be able to track calls from the lab itself.
There was no dial tone, just a constant, oscillating loop of two tones. I jammed my finger on the nine. Still the two tones. I pressed various buttons for different lines. Nothing.
There was a computer in the room.
I hit the Power button and the thing whirred to life. Not fast enough, though. I checked my watch, saw that I had less than ten minutes left, and spent two of those ten cursing the slow IBM. A log-in screen appeared, asking me for username and password.
I wanted to pick up the keyboard and drive it through the flat screen, but checked myself.
So, someone had thought ahead and cut all communications. Whoever had orchestrated this was good, much better than I was. But if you thought about it, they were also much better than the Baltimore Police Department, the San Jose Police Department, the FBI. And who was I? A guy who tracked down pathogens, all of which were too small to have a cortex.
I began to open and close drawers, and eventually was able to find a small tray with what I was looking for. I dropped the disposable scalpel into my pocket and walked into the hallway.
The place looked deserted. This might have been a comfort if I hadn’t suspected the bastard on Brooke’s phone wanted the place to be deserted.
I turned down the hall, following the exit signs,
passing a number of closed doors. Eventually, I came to a door at the end of the hallway. A black pad with a red light set in it was to the right, which was strange. One would think that people would be barred from getting in, not from getting out. Increasingly, though, everything about Chimeragen seemed strange.
I put the Chimeragen ID up to the pad. It beeped and continued to flash red. The handle, when I tried it, didn’t move. Again, I faced the card to the black plastic. Again, a beep and the red light. I was locked in.
I thought of Brooke and the man with her. I didn’t understand the angles here and didn’t want to piss anyone off and risk hurting her—though, in truth, I knew she was already in grave danger. The image of Gladys Thomas’s bloated face flashed through my mind. The gutted dogs. I pushed the pictures out of my head.
With the cell phone, I dialed Brooke’s number. After a few rings, the voice mail picked up. I didn’t leave a message. My watch said I still had two minutes until I was to be outside the building. I waited out the two minutes and called again. This time, someone answered the phone. It wasn’t Brooke.
“Dr. McCormick. Where are you?”
“I’m locked in the fucking building.” I tried to sound tough.
The man laughed. “They locked it down. Good for them. They’re learning. Okay, Doc, I want you to go into the pathology lab, the one where you were before.”
How does he know where I was before?
My cell phone chirped. Low battery.
The man said, “We’ll be there in two minutes. I want you to be fifteen feet from the door, on the right side of the room, with your hands on the lab bench. You got me?”
“I got you.” Fucker.
“If you don’t do what I say, I will hurt Dr. Michaels. You understand me, Dr. McCormick?”
In the background I heard Brooke yell, “Get out, Nate! Don’t listen—” Then the phone went dead. I checked my watch.
Isolation Ward Page 37