by Kira Peikoff
He lifted his head to look wearily at her.
“Can I at least sit up?” he asked.
“No.”
He sighed. “I’m still your husband, you know.”
She raised an eyebrow. His audacity never failed to astonish her.
“Everything I did was for us,” he insisted, his voice pathetic and shrill.
She didn’t dignify him with a response. They were beyond pleas, explanations, and apologies. The gap between them had yawned into an irrevocable chasm that rendered all words pointless. A tiny shake of her head was all she needed to communicate a diatribe of regret and disgust—made even more pointed by her refusal to say any of it.
He lay his cheek back on the floor and closed his eyes.
She wiped the sticky blood off her cell phone and dialed 911 on speaker.
An operator answered after one ring. “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
“Yes, hi.” The deceptively simple question left her searching for a way to explain; from a certain perspective, her whole life was an emergency. But hidden underneath the panic and the agony was the first inkling of peace she had felt in months. Because her quest for the truth was finally over. No more lies. No more pretense. From here on out, for the first time in three decades, she was on her own. And that didn’t sound so bad after all. She steadied herself with a deep breath.
“There’s a murderer in my house,” she said into the phone.
“Are you in any danger?”
Greg opened his eyes to await her answer.
“No.” She stared straight through him. “He’s no longer a threat.”
CHAPTER 55
Isabel
“He’s flat-lining!” Theo screamed through the partition. H“Hurry!”
Up front at the wheel, Isabel slammed her foot on the gas. The ambulance howled like a frightened wolf, its red and blue lights reflecting off the windshield as she careened down the West Side Highway toward the dock.
Her heart felt like it was pumping hard enough to power the engine. She was quivering so badly, she was practically levitating. There was no time to look over her shoulder at the chaos in the rear, not while she was edging toward ninety-five miles per hour, dodging cars so much slower they looked like they were standing still. But through the open partition, she could hear a shrill, sustained beep that told her everything she needed to know.
Almost immediately came the accordionlike groan of the automatic chest compression machine, amid the shouts of Theo and Dr. Cornell, one of the ship’s general surgeons who had come to assist. Isabel knew the solemn doctor only by sight because he was often ensconced in his lab, cloning organs, but Galileo spoke of him highly.
Galileo. Oh God. The violent scene replayed in her mind as if to force her to believe the unbelievable: the knife sinking into his stomach, his shell-shocked face, the blood spouting from his torn flesh. Too much blood. Brownish smears had dried on her own hands like scabs; she was too preoccupied to notice.
She zoomed into an empty lane, trying to tune out that horrible steady beep of the heart monitor, the men’s frantic voices, and the rustle of equipment—the slam of a compartment door, the pop of a line injection, the whirring of the ECMO machine. The word dead hovered at the gates of her consciousness, but she refused to let it in. He’s going to be fine, she thought. He can survive. I did. Richard did.
Yet there was one crucial difference between their plight and Galileo’s: Dr. Quinn. How well could Dr. Cornell and Theo compensate for his absence? Cornell’s specialty was organ repair, not resuscitation. At least Theo had been training under the master, but he was still an apprentice. Isabel couldn’t help cringing at the thought that Galileo’s life was resting in less-than-experienced hands.
It would all come down to the X101, Quinn’s legacy, the greatest gift he could give to Galileo from beyond the grave. She pictured the beauty of the real glass vial, the liquid compound as clear and pure as baptismal water.
Above the monitor’s high-pitched beep, Theo’s shout pelted her eardrums: “Can’t you go any faster?”
“Almost there,” she hollered over her shoulder, jerking the wheel to bypass a sleepy truck in her lane. The orange digits on the dashboard read 4:37 A.M. Outside the window, the Hudson River snaked along the highway, its blackness barely distinguishable from the sky above.
At last the road was clear. She crushed the pedal all the way to the floor. The ambulance blasted ahead, its engine whining as though it might combust. Soon they were zipping past the cavernous warehouses that comprised the parking lots for Chelsea Piers. The whole area stretched for dozens of blocks to accommodate all the private and commercial boats that stopped off in Manhattan.
Isabel kept her eyes peeled for the blocky white numbers of Pier 41. As soon as she spotted it, she turned sharply off the highway and zigzagged through the parking structure to the dock. There, the stately white ship rose high off the river like a tribute to grandness, a throwback to an era when greatness mattered. No lights shone through any of the portholes. The loading ramp lay unfurled against the flat wooden pier.
Isabel drove straight up to the ramp’s edge and slammed on the brakes. As ambulance squealed to a stop, Theo’s ashen face thrust through the partition.
“Go get the X101 and bring it back stat!”
She popped open the door. “Is he . . . ?”
“Just go, his neurons are already starting to die!”
She jumped out and scrambled up the ramp into the belly of the ship, beelining past two worried nurses down the stairs to deck 2. The drab hallway was empty. Of course no one was working because it was the middle of the night. She was shocked to realize that almost everyone else on the ship was still asleep—that they had no idea what was happening, despite their high stakes in the outcome.
She panted up to Dr. Quinn’s lab, refusing to attach any other name to the space—though she had only ever seen one man working there. The door was carelessly left open, against protocol; all labs were supposed to be locked overnight in case of a security breach. She peered warily around the door frame, but no one was there, so she bolted to the refrigerator. A vision rose in her mind of the single precious dose that lay chilled inside at a perfect 35 degrees.
She whipped open the door and reached out—
The plastic tray was empty. The vial was gone.
She rubbed her eyes, then stared again at the spot where the vial had been a mere two hours earlier. She’d seen it herself, because when Greg called to blackmail her into bringing it to the hospital, she’d compared the real one with the fake one she’d prepped instead.
A plume of cool air wafted into her face. She shut the fridge. Her fingertips felt numb with fear . . . and rage. There was only one person besides Galileo who knew the code to unlock the number pad on the door.
A person who was supposed to be under tight supervision.
Deck 3, she remembered, that’s where he’d been taken after his attempt on her life. Her fingers fluttered up to the base of her neck, where his rough hands had left her sore and bruised. Each swallow prompted a stab of pain.
She sprinted at full speed up to deck 3. It was eerily quiet and dark along the corridor. Doors lined it on either side, leading to researchers’ private cabins. She stopped in front of Chris’s and banged loudly. If Theo was no longer in charge of him, who the hell was?
No one answered. She kicked open the door—and gasped. On the floor, curled next to an overturned chair, lay Dr. Powell—the heart specialist who, with Theo, had pried Chris off Richard hours before. The bridge of the doctor’s nose looked broken, bright red blood trickled from both nostrils, and his broken glasses hung askew across his face. Chris was nowhere to be seen.
Dr. Powell moaned as she fell to her knees beside him.
“Where’s Chris?” She gave his shoulders a gentle shake. “Dr. Powell?”
He trained his dazed expression on her, appearing to have trouble focusing. After a few seconds, his eyes closed.
&n
bsp; “Do you know where he went?” she demanded.
He nudged his head a tiny bit from side to side.
A sob rose in her throat. Galileo’s brain was perishing with each passing second. She jumped to her feet and ran up to deck 4, then deck 5, scouring the kitchen, the gym, the dining room, the glass-walled lounge, the captain’s quarters—but no Chris. Not that she expected to find him; she knew she was too late.
Tears spilling freely, she raced back outside down the ramp, past the anxious nurses, to the waiting ambulance. Her head throbbed as she approached its closed rear doors. They loomed like the finish line of some failed race in which the most deserving contestants came in dead last.
Just as she was about to open the doors, a familiar sharp bark traveled downwind on the breeze from somewhere above her. She glanced up, confused.
There, on the roof of the ship, stood Captain, his rigid little body a pop of white against the blackness of the sky. His ears were perked, his tail stiff, and he was barking with the audacity of a much larger animal.
Isabel’s eyes darted to the object of his anger: Chris.
He was scrambling over the edge onto the evacuation ladder, then down the rungs as fast as he could with only one free hand. The other was raised in triumph as if bearing a torch, his fingers curled around something so clear it was almost invisible.
Silhouetted against the predawn sky, he hopped onto the end of the narrow jetty, about twenty feet out from the ambulance. The frigid river gurgled all around and behind him. He broke into a run toward land, but the moment he saw her, he gave a startled cry and stopped short.
She was standing defiantly in the center of the dock—arms crossed, stance wide—blocking his path to freedom.
CHAPTER 56
Isabel
At first neither of them moved. Ten feet apart, they traded venomous stares. Isabel narrowed her eyes at the vial in Chris’s fist, excruciatingly aware of each passing second. She wanted to scream, to charge at him with all the force she could muster, but knew she was no match for his gorilla strength. He could overpower her with devastating ease; he already had. And this time, there was no one to rescue her. No backup.
Blood rushed to her temples in a hurricane of panic that rendered her motionless. Her tough girl stance felt like a charade—the posture of a scrappier version of herself that existed only in fantasy—and any moment Chris was going to see right through it.
She was about to turn away in defeat when Galileo’s voice popped into her mind: Perception is often all that counts, my dear. The memory of his words struck her with a sudden insight that no amount of preparation could have enhanced.
She lifted her chin like she had all the time in the world. “Didn’t think we’d meet again, huh?”
Chris glared at her as he stormed over the jetty’s uneven rocks to close the gap between them. He clasped the vial to his chest. “I can go around you or through you.”
A few feet in front of the ambulance, she gave him her best impression of bored annoyance—head tilted, arms crossed, lips tight. He was fast advancing on her, his face twisted into an imperious sneer.
“Go ahead.” She smirked at him. “You’re getting exactly what you deserve.”
“The hell I am!” His knuckles whitened around the vial. “I made it and no one’s gonna take it away.”
She turned on her heel toward the ambulance, as if his fleeing were inconsequential. “Then it’s too bad Galileo already did.”
“What?” He leaped from the edge of the jetty onto the floating wooden dock; it groaned under his weight as he stalked closer to her. “I have it right here.”
She rolled her eyes as though he were woefully unsophisticated. “You really think Galileo would leave the only vial of X101 anywhere near you after what you did to me?” She shot him a withering look. “He’s not an idiot, you know. He replaced it in your lab with a fake—and thank God, because now he needs it way more than you do.”
Without waiting for his reaction, she threw open the ambulance’s rear door and scrambled inside to reveal an alarmed Theo and Dr. Cornell leaning over Galileo’s body on the stretcher. A tube was jammed down his throat; his naked torso was stuck with wires and lines leading to various machines; an automatic compression device was pumping up and down on his chest; ice packs lined his limbs; bloody bandages covered his stomach wounds. The heart monitor still displayed a single flat line.
“Where is it?” Theo demanded. “What took you so long?”
She shook her head, squeezing past him and Dr. Cornell and Galileo’s stretcher to get to the compartment in the ceiling. The same compartment from which, only two weeks ago back in Key West, she’d watched Chris withdraw a vial of X101 to resuscitate Richard. Those few milliliters of the drug were gone, of course. But the vial was not.
“Play along,” she hissed, reaching into the compartment and grabbing the cooler where the empty vial was still stashed. She quickly tore open a spare bag of saline in the cooler and dunked the vial in. Already she could hear Chris’s voice bellowing louder as he thundered toward the open doors.
“What the hell is going on?”
Isabel thrust the full vial at Theo just as Chris jumped inside, his biceps flexed, eyes blazing. Dr. Cornell shrank out of his way against the wall while Theo and Chris gaped at each other in a split second of mutual shock. If Chris registered Galileo’s peril, his expression betrayed no sympathy—nothing but raw, vessel-bursting rage.
“Hurry!” Isabel shouted at Theo. “Before he can stop you!”
She threw herself at Chris with all of the momentum she possessed as Theo connected the phony vial to a line inserted into Galileo’s shoulder.
“That’s mine!” Chris roared. “Don’t you dare!”
Isabel rammed her head into his broad chest, but her resistance was too weak to stop him. He let go of his own vial as he shoved her against a window, then lunged at Theo. The real vial plunked to the floor and rolled along the rubber mat; her hand immediately shot out to snatch it up. Only Dr. Cornell noticed; he was cowering on his haunches, but his spine straightened as a look of understanding crossed his face.
Theo shrieked at Chris to get away, hovering protectively over his own vial, but Chris threw himself at it with reckless abandon. They traded violent shoves until Chris emerged from the scuffle victorious—or so he thought. As soon as his fist closed around the new vial, he bolted to the rear doors and leaped out onto the dock. Isabel pressed the real one into Theo’s outstretched palm, then stampeded after Chris for good measure.
“Stop!” she yelled, her sneakers pounding the dock. “Come back!”
He sprinted away at top speed without ever looking back. She chased him all the way down to the parking structure, panting and shouting. Her last glimpse was of his hunched shoulders as he scurried, ratlike, into the shadowy void.
When the echo of his footsteps faded, she ran back to the ambulance to find Theo and Dr. Cornell almost finished draining the X101 into Galileo’s tube.
They both stared at her in awe as she climbed inside.
Theo offered her a helping hand. “I had no idea you could act.”
A weary smile tugged at her lips. “Well,” she said, “I was a TV star.”
CHAPTER 57
Isabel
Forty-eight nerve-wracking hours needed to pass before Galileo’s prognosis would become clear. Isabel knew this, but like everyone else on the ship, she couldn’t resist lining up outside the ICU on deck 1 for an opportunity to glimpse his lifeless body and pay her silent regards. During the first few hours, the line stretched out the hospital door and backed up to the stairwell.
All the researchers, doctors, and support staff had woken up that morning to the staggering news of his death, along with Chris’s betrayal and escape. More than thirty people deluged Isabel’s cabin at 7 A.M. to drill her—some furious, others in tears—about what had happened during the night. She groggily related the entire sequence of events, from Richard’s punched eye and the hospital c
onfrontation that culminated in Greg’s vicious knifing to Chris’s theft of the X101 and her desperate last-minute retrieval.
“It should work,” she declared to the anxious crowd. “I mean, he wasn’t dead long enough for his whole brain to die, right?”
Her statement was met with a troubled silence, and Isabel knew what they were all thinking: The X101 came with zero guarantees. It hadn’t yet been tested on someone who’d died of blood loss. Even though Galileo had received the necessary injection, been cooled down to 70 degrees, and undergone a blood transfusion and surgery to repair his gutted stomach, he was still dead—in the clinical sense, if not necessarily in the permanent, irreversible sense. So far, his monitors registered no heartbeat and no brain waves.
Isabel sensed there was also something else upsetting the group, making them trade anguished looks: Galileo had used up the very last dose of X101. And Chris, the only one who knew how to make it, was no longer around to engineer it from scratch. The video surveillance of him in the lab would not be enough by itself to enable them to synthesize the formula. Those precious few milliliters had contained a sacred promise—to fund the Network’s costly experiments as long as everyone working there was alive. The painful realization descended on the researchers like a collective sucker punch: Without a perfect sample left to analyze, the drug—and their future security—was lost.
Isabel could offer them no comfort. They stumbled out of her cabin with a shattered stupefaction she recognized all too well. She’d experienced the same feeling after her father’s sudden heart attack: It was the struggle to reconcile yourself to your hellish new reality. No matter how strenuous your denial, the truth waited like an unavoidable snake, ready to sink its fangs into your flesh at every turn.
Seven hours into the waiting period, around 11 A.M., Richard was discharged from St. Luke’s. When he returned in a taxi, Isabel was the only person there to welcome him. He emerged onto the dock with a wry smile and a black patch over his injured eye. His cheekbones seemed to have grown sharper and his step slower, lending him an air of tired dignity. She ran down the ramp to throw her arms around his neck.