The Select

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Or insider knowledge," Arthur said. "She might very well have known that this Crawford was not going to show up. The two of them might have cooked up this entire scenario together."

  "Then I say, Bravo! More power to her. If your suspicions are true, then all the more reason to accept her. We're always saying we want students with something extra, something that's not reflected in the grade point average, aren't we? Well, here it is. In spades. This young woman is utterly determined to come here. She will not take no for an answer. Isn't this the caliber of student we're looking for? With the training and direction The Ingraham can give her, won't she be one hell of a force in the outside world? Nothing is going to stand in this woman's way. Isn't this what The Ingraham is all about?"

  "But—" Arthur began.

  "Plus she's female," Walter said, pressing on. He had the other committee members' attention, could see the growing interest in their eyes. He was not going to let Arthur break his stride now. "The Ingraham is constantly criticized for not taking enough women. Here's a chance to accept a woman who has the potential of doing more than any ten other students on that wait list combined. I say to hell with the rest of the wait list. We accept Quinn Cleary now."

  "But the Kleederman equation questions," Arthur said. "She missed one."

  "Negative thinking, Arthur," Walter said, wagging his finger. "She may have answered only two of the three, but she got them both right. And if she'd got all three, she would have been one of our first choices for acceptance, am I correct?"

  "Yes." His tone was reluctant. "But—"

  "But nothing. She got two right. That's enough. She didn't get the third wrong, she simply didn't do it. Maybe she missed it. Maybe she wasn't sure and she was going to come back to it but ran out of time. It doesn't matter. She got two right. She qualifies, Arthur. And she'll be a credit to The Ingraham."

  "I don't know, Walter..."

  It was Arthur's first show of uncertainty. Walter leapt to the advantage. He faced the other four.

  "What do you say?" He met the stares of Cohen, Mercer, Cofone, and Miles one by one. "Do we take her in, or do we tell her that initiative, tenacity, and determination have no place at The Ingraham and send her packing? Which will it be?"

  "Accepting a woman in place of a male will cause rooming problems, but that's why we have extra rooms," Mercer said. "I'm for taking her."

  Cofone nodded. "Sure. Why not?"

  "After all, she's already here," Cohen said.

  Phyllis Miles frowned. "I'm not saying this because I'm the only woman here, but The Ingraham could use another female in the incoming class. It's terribly unbalanced."

  "Then it's done!" Walter said.

  Arthur cleared his throat. "Not quite. I'll have to run this by the senator. He should be arriving within the hour. I'll show him Cleary's record and convey to him the sentiments of the committee."

  "And what are your sentiments, Arthur? Are you actively opposed?"

  "I don't like prospective students to try and pull a fast one, but since I have no hard proof, I shall not contend against her. If she meets with the approval of you five and with the senator, then I shall go along."

  Good, Walter thought. Only one more hurdle, and that might be a tough one. It was difficult sometimes to predict how the Senator and the Kleederman Foundation would react.

  *

  The wait didn't just seem endless—it was endless.

  Hours on those hard, narrow chairs in the Admissions Office. Quitting time had come and gone for Marge and Claire and Evelyn but all three had stayed on, encouraging her, warning her not to give up hope.

  "Dr. Alston didn't tell me to start polling the waiting list," Marge kept saying. "That's got to mean something— something good."

  Tim was optimistic too: "As long as they haven't sent you packing, you're still in the game."

  And then someone was walking down the Administration Building's deserted main corridor, coming their way. The five of them huddled on their seats, waiting. Quinn could barely breathe. A graying head with thick white eyebrows poked through the doorway.

  "Miss Cleary?"

  "Yes?" Quinn said, rising, trembling.

  "There you are." He smiled. "Do you remember me?"

  "Of course. You're Dr. Emerson. You interviewed me last winter."

  "Right. And recommended you very highly."

  "Thank you."

  "Well, it didn't do you much good on the first round, I'm sad to say. But that's all water under the bridge now. The committee has voted to let you take the place of the no-show." He thrust out a gnarled hand. "Welcome to The Ingraham, Miss Cleary."

  Marge cried, "Yes!" and Evelyn cheered and Claire said, "Praise the Lord!" over and over as Quinn stepped forward on wobbly knees to shake Dr. Emerson's hand.

  His grip was firm and his eyes twinkled.

  "Looks like you've gathered quite a cheering section here," he said.

  "It's been a long afternoon and we've all become well acquainted."

  "People seem to warm to you very quickly. That's a valuable asset for a doctor. Don't lose it." He gave her hand one final squeeze. "You can register officially here in this office tomorrow. Welcome aboard."

  Then he was gone, walking back down the hall. And suddenly Marge and Claire and Evelyn were all over her, hugging her, patting her on the back. Quinn stood in a daze, barely aware of them. The full import of what she'd just been told was seeping slowly through to her, like water soaking into a sponge. She'd made it.

  I'm in! I'm going to be a doctor!

  Christmas, New Year's Eve, her sixteenth birthday, all at once. She felt tears spring into her eyes as she glanced at Tim. He was still in his chair, legs crossed, arms folded across his chest. Everything she'd read about body language told her he was blocking something out—or locking something in. But then he smiled and gave her a thumbs up.

  Quinn began to cry. Matt and Tim—such good friends. They'd saved her life—or the closest thing to it. How could she ever repay them?

  She couldn't. Ever. But the least she could do was call Matt and let him know the plan had worked.

  She broke away from the Admissions Office ladies, thanked them with all her heart for their support, then leaned over and kissed Tim on the forehead.

  "Thank you," she whispered.

  He seemed embarrassed. "Nothing to it."

  She turned back to the ladies and waved. "I've got to call home and tell everybody the news. I'll see you all tomorrow."

  She ran for the phone booth in the hall and dialed home.

  MONITORING

  Louis Verran sat amid his blinking indicator lights, twitching meters, tangled wires, and flashing read-outs, dreaming of France. He'd spent July in Nice, with side trips to Camargue and Bourgogne. He'd gone alone, stayed alone—except for those nights when he found a companion—and returned alone. Four weeks had been plenty. As much as he loved Nice and its people, he loved this room even more. All his toys were here, and he missed them when he was away. He'd spent most of August tuning up the electronics. Everything was working perfectly now, everything set for another year. This was the way it was supposed to be: everything under control, and all the controls at his fingertips.

  Get a life! That was what his ex-wife had told him the last time she'd walked out. Yeah, well, someday he would. When he retired it would be to France. He spoke French like a native, loved their wine, their cheese, their gustatorial abandon. They knew how to live. But until then, Monitoring was where he felt truly alive. This was his life.

  He was reaching for a fresh cigar when Alston walked in with Senator Whitney. He shoved the cylinder out of sight.

  "There's been a change in the roster," Alston said. "Room 252 in the dorm won't be empty as originally planned. We're sticking a female in there. Her name is Cleary, Quinn."

  Verran nodded. "No problem. It's all tuned up and ready to go, just like the rest of dorm."

  "Good," the senator said. He smoothed the streaks of gray at his temp
les. "I want you to keep a close eye on that girl for the first few months."

  "Looking for anything in particular?" Verran said, hoping for a clue.

  "Anything out of the ordinary," Senator Whitney said. "Her advent is a bit unusual, so we just want her under scrutiny for awhile."

  "You got it."

  Anything out of the ordinary. Big help. But when the senator said keep an extra close watch, he didn't have to say why. The senator represented the folks who wrote Verran's biweekly check, so Louis would get it done. Pronto.

  Verran tracked her down to one of the pay phones in the Administration building. He had remote taps on every phone in The Ingraham complex. Once he isolated the tap, he adjusted his headphones and listened in.

  The first Quinn Cleary call was nothing special. 5.06 minutes to her mother, burbling and sobbing over how happy she was about getting in at last. The Irish-sounding mother wasn't exactly overjoyed. Didn't sound happy at all, as a matter of fact. Strange. You'd think a mother would be jumping for joy that her kid had just got herself a full ride to the best medical school in the country—in the freaking world.

  Well, you couldn't choose your parents. Couldn't choose the name they gave you, either. What the hell kind of first name was Quinn, anyway? It made Verran think of Zorba the Greek. Some parents were weird. Louis's mother, for instance. He shook his head sadly at the thought of her tight-lipped mouth and wide, wild eyes. There was one lady who'd been a few trestles shy of a full-length bridge.

  The second call was more interesting. To a guy named Matt Crawford. The name sounded familiar and Louis had to smile when he checked it against the name of the kid who hadn't showed today. Wouldn't tight-ass Alston like to know about this. The little bitch had pulled a fast one on him.

  Hadn't really broken any rules—bent a couple into pretzels, maybe, but no harm done. And even if she had trampled a few of Alston's rules, it made no nevermind to Verran. In fact he kind of admired her ingenuity. She had what his father used to call pluck. Verran wasn't sure exactly what pluck was, but he was pretty sure this girl had it.

  All the more reason to keep an eye on her. Not just because the senator had said so, but because kids with pluck were unpredictable. Louis Verran didn't like unpredictability, and he loathed surprises.

  She finished her call to Crawford and left the hall phone. Verran cut the feed from the tap.

  Yes, Miss Quinn Cleary could bend, break, even mutilate all the Dr. Alston rules she wished, just so long as she didn't mess with any of the Louis Verran rules. Those were the ones that kept The Ingraham operating smoothly and efficiently and, most crucially, quietly.

  You've had your fun, Quinn Cleary, he thought as he removed his headphones. Now be a good little med student and keep your nose clean for the next four years and we'll all love you. But if you don't, I'll know. And I'll land on you like a ton of bricks.

  FIRST SEMESTER

  Second quarter sales reports place Kleederman Pharmaceuticals firmly in the top spot as the highest-grossing and most profitable pharmaceutical company in the world.

  The New York Times

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "I don't think I can go in there."

  Quinn couldn't believe she was reacting like this. She stood with her knees locked and her back pressed against the tiled wall of the hallway. She was afraid she'd tip over and fall if she moved away from the wall. The tuna fish sandwich she'd had for lunch seemed to be sitting in the back of her throat; it wanted out. She hoped her panic wasn't evident to the other first-year students passing by in their fresh gray lab coats.

  "Sure you can," Tim said. "There's nothing to it. You just put one foot in front of the other and—"

  "There are dead bodies in there," she said through her tightly clenched teeth. "Twenty-five of them.

  "Right. That's why they call it the Anatomy Lab."

  Quinn's euphoria at becoming a member of The Ingraham's student body had been short-lived. It had floated her along through the first night. All sixteen women enrolled in The Ingraham—seventeen now with Quinn—were housed in what they called Women's Country, a cluster of rooms at the end of the south wing's second floor. The four women The Ingraham originally had accepted into the new class already had been paired off together. Since she couldn't very well move into the room that had been allocated to Matt—despite the protestations of the guy set to be Matt's roommate that he had absolutely no objections to bunking with her—Quinn wound up with a room all to herself, which she did not mind. In fact she liked the idea of having her own private suite. But the daily maid service...she wondered if she'd ever get used to that.

  Her high lasted through most of the following day's orientation lectures, but it began to thin when she checked in at the student bookstore and received her microscope, her dissection kit, and a three-foot stack of textbooks and laboratory workbooks.

  The last wisps were shredded by her first anatomy lecture. The professors at The Ingraham weren't holding back, weren't about to coddle anyone who might be a little slow in adjusting. Their attitude was clear: they were addressing the best of the best, the cream of the intellectual crop, and they saw no reason why they shouldn't plunge into their subjects and proceed at full speed. They covered enormous amounts of material in an hour's time.

  Quinn's concentration was taxed to the limit that first morning. At U. Conn she'd had to put in her share of crunch hours to get her grades, but all along she'd known she was somewhere near the high end of the learning curve in her class. The courses had been pitched to the center of that curve. She'd sailed through them.

  Perhaps the courses here too were being pitched toward the center of a curve, but Quinn was quite sure she was not at the upper end of this curve. She hoped she was at least near the middle. She would not be sailing through these courses. She'd be rowing. Rowing like crazy.

  You're playing with the big boys now, she told herself

  But she'd handle it. She'd take anything they threw at her and somehow find a way to toss it right back at them.

  Except perhaps a dead human being.

  She'd never really thought about the fact that a good part of her first year would be spent dissecting a human cadaver. Human Anatomy Lab had been an abstraction. She'd grown up on a farm, for God's sake. She'd delivered calves on her own and helped slaughter chickens, turkeys, and pigs for the table. And in college she'd dissected her share of worms and frogs and fish and fetal pigs and even a cat during Comparative Anatomy as an undergrad. No problem. Well, the cat had posed a bit of a problem—she'd known it had been a stray, but she couldn't help wondering if it had ever belonged to someone, if somewhere a child was still waiting for her kitty to come home. But she'd got past that.

  This was different. Starting today she'd be dissecting a human being—slicing into, peeling back, cutting away the tissues of something that once had been somebody. Intellectually, she'd been able to handle that, at least until she'd approached the entrance to the Anatomy Lab, felt the sting of the cool, dank, formaldehyde-laden air in her nostrils as the double doors had swung open and closed, and caught a fleeting glimpse of those rows of large, plastic-sheet-covered forms lumped upon their tables under the bright banks of fluorescents.

  Suddenly the prospect was no longer abstract. There were corpses under those sheets and she was going to have to touch one. Put a knife right into it.

  She didn't know if she could. And that angered her. Why was she being so squeamish?

  "Come on, Quinn," Tim said, taking her elbow. "I'll be right beside you."

  "I'll be okay," she said, shaking him off and straightening herself away from the wall. She was not going to be led into the lab like some sort of invalid. "I'm fine. It's just...the smell got to me for a moment."

  "Yeah. I know what you mean." Tim grimaced. "It's pretty bad. But we'd better get used to it. We've got three afternoons a week in there for the next two semesters."

  "Great." Quinn took a deep breath. "Okay. Lead on, MacDuff."

  "Easy: S
hakespeare—Macbeth—the eponymous character."

  "If you say so."

  As they pushed through the swinging doors the formaldehyde hit her like a punch in the nose. Her eyes watered, her nose began to run. She glanced at Tim. He was blinking behind his shades and sniffing too.

  He smiled at her, a bit weakly she thought. "How you doing, Quinn?"

  Quinn coughed. She swore she could taste the formaldehyde. "They say we'll adjust. I'd like to believe that."

  Tim nodded. "Just be glad the air conditioning's working. It's ninety-five outside. Can you imagine what this place would be like if we had an extended power failure?"

  Quinn couldn't—didn't even want to try.

  She said, "Let's check the list and see where we're—"

  "I already did. Our table's over here."

  "Our table?"

  "Number four."

  "How'd we happen to get together?" she said. "Did you pull something—?"

  "Not my doing, I swear. Check the list yourself. Brown is the last of the B's. There's only two C's, and Cleary comes before Coye. They put us together."

  Quinn stepped over to the bulletin board. Sure enough: Brown, T. and Cleary, Q. were assigned to table four.

  "Come on," Tim said. "Stop dragging this out. Let's go meet Mr. Cadaver."

  Table four was in the far left corner. As they made their way toward it, Quinn took in her surroundings. The Anatomy Lab was a long, high ceilinged room, brightly lit by banks of fluorescents. Twenty-five tables were strung out in two rows of ten and one row of five; a lecture/demonstration area took up the free corner.

  She and Tim were among the last to arrive but no one was looking at them. They all were standing at their assigned metal tables, one on each side, flanking their cadavers—inert mounds beneath light green plastic sheets. Quinn studied the faces of her fellow students as she passed. Some grim, some green, some as gray as their lab coats, some avid and animated, all a bit anxious.