“I’m not so sure Otto will get away with it.”
“Why?”
“Don’t be dense. You’re here. You’re talking to me.”
I didn’t really appreciate the “dense” jab, but she was probably right, and I let it go. She pointed to the file in my hand. “Use that information however you wish. And take these. I won’t need them.” She produced a clutch of IDs and keys: the university, Chimeragen, the Gilroy facility. She dropped the items onto the folder in my hand.
We waited a moment in the shadows, keenly aware, I guess, that this really was farewell. True finality—whether it’s the finality of a marriage or the finality of a death, which this, in a sense, was—is a big deal and deserves some reverence.
She took in the building around us, then turned back to me and said, “I should be going. Good luck, Nathaniel.”
I wondered, looking at her like that—resting with her back against the nice car, arms crossed in front of her, travel clothes on—whether there was some part of her contemplating what it would have been like if she had stayed with me. I mean, I wondered that all the time for the first few years: if she’d been with me, I wouldn’t have socked Pablo in the coffeehouse and I wouldn’t have been kicked out of school, I might have been a surgeon, I might have been a urologist. I certainly wouldn’t have gone to Africa, then gone to CDC. And Alaine wouldn’t have been with Ian, and she likely wouldn’t be talking to me in this parking lot right now, getting ready to flee the country.
I wondered if she wondered. And I hoped she did.
But even as I was tracking through the myriad what-ifs of Nathaniel McCormick and Alaine Chen, I managed to get some clarity. In that moment, I felt I was finally free.
“It never would have worked out between us,” I said.
A sad little smile pulled the corners of her mouth. “No,” she agreed.
For all those years, I’d assumed it was I who had the problems, that I had derailed our relationship. Now I realized that Alaine was largely to blame. I might have fallen apart, sure, but she was the one who had bolted, who had left at the first sign of trouble. She was never in love with me, I think. She’d been in love with an idea of me, and when that fantasy started to crack, she was gone. In the same way, she was in love with the idea of Ian Carrington. But Ian was a murderer of sorts—not to mention a bland rube whose thoughts consisted only of where his business was going, whether he could save it, maybe whatever workout schedule he planned the next day—and I can’t imagine that her fantasy of him was intact. At least he was rich, as she’d said. At least Alaine seemed to have come to terms with how important that was for her.
Anyway, I wondered how she would deal with a lifetime in Uruguay or in whatever backwater she was going to, how she would deal with Ian Carrington, the fugitive. Despite her game face that night, I didn’t think she’d cope well.
And though I think I understood quite a lot about Alaine Chen in that moment, I still had trouble understanding why she’d helped me. I asked her.
“I told you,” she said, “things were getting out of control.”
“That’s not it,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know, Nathaniel.” Then she surprised me. Her eyes began to mist; the tears welled, then dribbled down her face. “I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
And that, I think, was the most honest thing she’d ever said to me.
For the first time in a decade, I stopped hating Alaine Chen. I stopped loving her. I felt, simply, sorry for her.
She brushed away the tears and sighed. She was ready to go. I asked, “Anything I can do for you?”
“You can wait until tomorrow afternoon before you tell anyone I’ve gone. You owe me that.”
And, in truth, I did.
I nodded. Alaine did, too, then stepped into the BMW. The engine turned over and the car slid quietly out of its parking space. I stood there, watching her go, the IDs and keys balanced on the thick folder. As she drove off, I raised my bandaged left hand. I saw her wave, a tiny flutter that seemed mockingly banal.
Good-bye, Alaine. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
CHAPTER 97
I dropped my hand to my side, felt the blood rush into it, kick-starting the first, dull pulses of pain. The lidocaine was wearing off. It would not be too long before I’d be screaming for the damn thing to be removed. No time for pain, I thought. Easy to think, hard to endure.
My real problem was Harriet Tobel. More exactly, Harriet Tobel’s legacy. She was being set up, right? I couldn’t let that happen, correct? Less heroic thoughts began to creep in. To wit, I wanted to cleanse Dr. Tobel’s file completely. Who needed to know she’d engineered a terrible virus? Her aims were good; her tactics and her morals were flawed. But we’re all allowed one slipup in our lives, aren’t we? Why allow decades of good work to be sullied by some bad decisions in the autumn of her life?
Besides, Dr. Tobel had scrubbed my file so I could return to medical school. I owed her this. I realized I was letting loyalty trump truth—I realized I was cutting Dr. Tobel a break where I wouldn’t allow the same for Otto Falk—but screw it. I didn’t allow myself to equivocate any longer.
So, now that the moral dialogue was over, I knew what I had to do. I just did not know where to do it.
What I couldn’t figure was how and where Otto Falk was planning to set up Dr. Tobel. He’d need some evidence, something he could point out to law enforcement. I didn’t think a smart guy like him would go in for hearsay. So, where would that evidence be? Falk’s lab? The Gilroy facility? The Chimeragen offices?
No. Like the crooked cop dropping a bag of cocaine into an innocent’s car, he’d plant the evidence where it counted most. The Tobel lab.
I opened Dr. Munoz’s Mustang and dropped the file on the front seat. I gathered Alaine’s IDs and walked to the Heilmann Building. There, I took the steps, the handcuffs adding a Quasimodo jingle to my journey upward.
The lights were on in Harriet Tobel’s lab. Shit, I thought, and walked casually to the door. Just another overworked grad student out for a stroll, that’s me. Bandaged and bloodstained hand? Handcuffs? Probably some sick psychiatry experiment.
I looked in the lab, half-expecting to see Dr. Falk himself: pitchfork leaned against a lab bench, barbed tail twirling, belching flames as he giggled to himself. I saw no one.
I was about to enter the lab when I heard something.
Doors from an elevator, opening somewhere up the hall. I managed to make it to a bend in the corridor before I heard voices. Then I peered around the corner. I saw two men whom I didn’t recognize, dressed in jeans and T-shirts—working clothes—and carrying what looked like an ice chest. They stopped in front of the door to Dr. Tobel’s lab, set the ice chest down. One of the men opened the door. They adjusted their load and disappeared into the lab.
What the hell is this?
As I waited for the men to exit, I found myself focusing on the pain in my left hand. How long, I wondered, before I would be willing to trade my kingdom for a couple of Vicodin?
More than five minutes, anyway, which is about how much time passed before I heard the men again. Their footsteps faded down the hallway, no talking this time. Elevator doors opened, then closed. I gave it a beat, then went to the lab.
The lights were off.
The door was, of course, locked, so I pushed Alaine’s university ID to the black pad and waited. A red light flashed, then nothing.
Odd. I tried the card again. Still nothing. Alaine, it seemed, was being locked out. Why and when had this happened?
Before I started ramming the door with my wrecked hand or lacerated shoulder, I fished in my pocket for Harriet Tobel’s old ID and used that. The light flashed green. I entered the lab, expecting the place to be cleaned out. But I was wrong. It looked like the movers I’d seen in Gilroy had taken only the clutter, less than half the equipment. Either that or these poor blokes were having a mother of a workday, moving items to Gilroy, then ba
ck to the university. Actually, on reflection, I suspected the latter might be the case.
Because the gentlemen had been carrying an ice chest, I used my amazing powers of deduction and figured they might have been toting something that needed to be kept cold. I went to the cold room, which, like the lab itself, was fashioned with an electronic lock. Again, Alaine’s key card didn’t work. Again, Dr. Tobel’s did.
Christ, Alaine, why are you locked out?
The cold room was small, about ten by ten, with two upright freezers on opposite sides and one horizontal freezer directly across from me. Each had a small lock on the latch. I took the clutch of IDs and keys given to me by Alaine. I’d spent years getting into and out of freezers like this, and so I knew exactly what I was looking for. I found it: a small brass key.
Dropping the other items on the horizontal freezer, I went to the upright on my right, the LED on the front reading –80 degrees Celsius. I tried the key. Success. Evidently, it wasn’t as easy to change physical locks as it was electronic ones. I turned the key, pulled the latch, and opened the door.
The freezer consisted of a stack of six shelves, each with a thin, frost-covered door in front of it. I went for the top shelf and pulled the door. A few racks of plastic Falcon tubes filled with a frozen pinkish substance. I moved to the next shelf and found the same. The next contained slide boxes. Nothing but tubes and slide boxes in the rest of the freezer.
I moved to the next upright. The same uninteresting stuff: slides, bags filled with microfuge tubes, racks of Falcon tubes.
“Come on,” I scolded myself.
The next freezer was emblazoned with biohazard signs, those ugly crablike symbols that basically signify “Don’t touch.” Risk taker that I am, I jammed the key in the lock.
There was nothing in the top two shelves. On the third one down, however . . . Well, even for a guy who spends his life with germs, this was a shocker.
There was a tray filled with plastic bags and specimen containers. Innocent-looking stuff, really, except for what was written on the tray and the bags in big black indelible marker: BSL 3. BSL—biosafety level—was a series of protocols for dealing with microbes and graded on a scale of one to four. Very few bugs were BSL 4, a designation for only the most contagious pathogens—Russian spring-summer encephalitis and Ebola, for example—that could be spread through the air. BSL 3 was still bad, and encompassed many of the bacteria and viruses I feared most. Having BSL specimens sitting in a relatively unsecured freezer, in a room without proper ventilation and safety equipment, was a serious no-no. Maybe this was Falk’s plan: get Harriet Tobel nabbed for hazardous-materials violations. In any case, it was pretty obvious this stuff had been moved here recently, say, in the previous ten minutes. Where it came from, I didn’t know. It didn’t really matter at that point, anyway.
I closed the door: this was BSL 3, after all, and I wanted some protection. I found a box of gloves and managed to squirm one on my right hand. I sure as hell couldn’t pull on the left or get a mask on my face. Maybe I’d just hold my breath.
Slowly, so as not to suck more crap into the room than necessary, I opened the door. With my good hand, I took the tray from the middle shelf and set it on the floor, carefully removing one of the double-sealed plastic bags. You didn’t need to go to medical school to know what I held in my hand. It was a heart. Human. I pawed through the other bags. Human liver, pancreas, spleen. I went back to the freezer. A small container was pushed to the back of the shelf: in it, double-bagged, were slices of a five-pound organ.
“Jesus,” I said aloud.
On the bag was written a date not two weeks before, followed by another date two days later. These would be the harvest date and the date the specimen had been put into the freezer, respectively. The word Brain was written in small script. Behind that, three small letters in block capitals: KCF. Kincaid Charles Falk.
I put the bags with the liver and the kidneys back in the tray—threw them, actually. Besides being BSL 3 contaminants, these were from a guy who had been gutted and buried in the woods. Handling them like this had to be bad karma.
There were specimen containers—small plastic jars with screw caps—on the shelves below the organs, also a tray for Falcon tubes that looked like they were filled with blood. I pulled a tray that held about a dozen of the specimen jars. Again, “KCF” was written on each. And there was something else. A piece of paper enclosed in a plastic bag.
With some difficulty I managed to replace the tray and grab hold of the page. Through the frosted plastic, I could make out a standard contact page, who was responsible for the items in the freezer, how to get in touch with them in case of emergency, et cetera. KCF organs and tissue was written neatly in a space near the top. Underneath, next to the word Contact, was a name I did not want to see, along with cell phone and pager numbers. Her familiar signature graced the bottom of the page. Alaine Chen.
Suddenly, it made sense why Alaine’s ID didn’t work in the lab, why she was being locked out.
Harriet Tobel was not the only one who had been set up.
CHAPTER 98
I slammed the freezer door shut and ran into the lab, ran for Harriet Tobel’s private office. This door wasn’t locked. Not a surprise, considering Falk wanted this place to be open for the police the next morning. I was convinced Ian Carrington was in on it, too. Feeding Alaine the lines about Dr. Tobel’s setup, letting Alaine think she had a confidant.
In the office, I opened the unlocked credenza. What had been empty two days ago was now half-full. I began tearing out hanging file folders, throwing them to the desk, opening them the best I could with my throbbing left hand and handcuffed right. Everything was here. Well, everything that could have directly linked Harriet Tobel and Alaine Chen to the disasters of the past few weeks. There were biopsy records for Douglas Buchanan. The pages were signed by Randall Jefferson and stapled to FedEx airbills addressed to and countersigned by Alaine Chen. Medical records detailing physical exams for Douglas. Neurological exams. And that name—Alaine, Alaine, Alaine—on all of the receipts. God forgive her, because she knoweth not what she did. Alaine, who was always in control, who always made the calculated first move—whether it be to leave a young Nate McCormick or to leak information to an older Nate McCormick—had been duped.
Deeper into the files, I dug out a folder filled with bits and pieces of paper: telephone numbers, what looked like instructions for wiring money to a bank account. There was also a CV of sorts there: Richard Craw. Seems the guy worked for the CIA for a while, then for a bunch of private security firms. I guessed the Surgeon did have an actual name; he hadn’t just crawled from the script of some straight-to-video thriller.
Richard Craw. Great name. Not great for Dr. Tobel’s legacy or Alaine Chen’s future. Though neither Dr. Tobel’s nor Alaine’s name appeared anywhere in this file, its placement in this lab sure as hell did not look good.
I spent a few more minutes blazing through what was left and, not finding anything good, stopped, feeling sick to my stomach. The desk, the top of the credenza, and the floor were all littered with paper. I gathered the incriminating things together in a clumsy stack and looked around for a bag or box to dump them in.
Back into the lab. On a bench I found a plastic box filled with bottles of ethanol and whatever other mix of flammable crap. I dumped the contents onto the bench, creating another hazardous-materials violation. Murder aside, if the university sent an inspection team in here, now that would be bad.
I put the files in the plastic box and I began to think.
Alaine was implicated by all of this, sure. I mean, her name was everywhere; the organs from the dead man in Baltimore were in the lab she ran with Dr. Tobel. A wee bit incriminating. But for her and Dr. Tobel to be responsible for everything—KC Falk, Gladys Thomas, the attacks on Brooke and me—well, that would be a stretch. Especially if she were able to defend herself, to implicate Ian and Otto. If it came to that, she would—I knew this much about the girl�
�bring down everyone and everything.
So, it wouldn’t come to that. Otto and Ian wouldn’t let her run to South America. They couldn’t, I was sure, take a chance on her talking. “Otto has too much at stake,” Alaine had told me. “Don’t be naïve about him.”
Well, I was becoming less and less naïve; I really began to panic.
I turned on my cell phone, got Alaine’s number, and dialed out from a landline in the lab. No rings; voice mail picked up immediately.
“Come on, Alaine. . . .” I dialed again just in case and got the same.
I booted up the computer, hoping that in the new lax security of the Tobel lab, I wouldn’t need a password. I needed Alaine’s home address. If she wasn’t there, I’d hit the Chimeragen offices, then—goddamn it—I suppose I’d come back here ag—
“Dr. McCormick.”
I swung around and could not believe what I saw. Richard Craw. The Surgeon.
CHAPTER 99
He stood there, face alive with angry welts and blisters, tears slicking his cheeks. His skin was stained yellow from the acid and small burn holes pocked his shirt and jacket. The silencer on the gun in his hand extended from the barrel like a black roll of LifeSavers.
Not good.
He blinked twice, looked at me, then at the files spread all over the room, the box of files on the desk. “It seems we had the same idea.” I didn’t respond, so he offered, “We’re both trying to clean house.”
Grasping for the moral high ground, and white-lying a little to do so, I answered, “I’m not cleaning anything.”
He cranked back the slide on the gun, chambering a bullet.
Okay, that was a nonstarter. I scrambled for something else to say, something to give me a little time to think. “How did you get off the highway?”
The corners of his mouth pulled to a smile; this guy obviously took some pride in his work. “Less than three minutes to get into my car and wash my eyes enough to drive. The police can’t respond in three minutes.”
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