Chapter 16
Tuesday, April 7
10:32 p.m.
Winston Bartlett looked at the white phone on the oak end table beside his chair and argued with himself about picking it up and calling the Dutchman. When Van de Vliet was at his office at the institute, they communicated by encrypted videophone. By this time, though, he was usually home, but he still hadn't called to say what had happened with Alexa Hampton. Now they would have to talk over an open line. Damn him.
After his explosive run‑in with Stone Aimes—damn him too—Bartlett had gone up to the Park Avenue place to check on Kristen firsthand and try to console her. But he wasn't actually sure she recognized him; at times she seemed to and then at other times she would just stare at him blankly. Her mind increasingly had an in‑and‑out relationship with reality, and today was an out day.
The time had come to be deeply concerned about her. She couldn't be kept under wraps forever. He had checked her into the Dorian Institute under an assumed name, Kirby Parker, to try to avoid any publicity. Now that was the only
name she could remember. How had the Syndrome done that to her?
Kristen Starr, whose identity was known to several million watchers of cable TV, could no longer remember her own name. Karl had worked with her every day, but no medication he had tried had even minimally slowed the Syndrome's progress.
The Beta had seemed so promising. Kristen's body had been rejuvenated—her face was looking like she'd had perfect plastic surgery, and there'd been no discernible side effects. It was everything they’d all hoped for. Kristen was elated and even the normally cautious Van de Vliet was buoyed.
Yes, the Beta was so close. Karl had to find a way to make it work.
In spite of all Winston Bartlett's entrepreneurial derring‑do, he always knew he was at the mercy of time. He was getting ever closer to that final dance with destiny. But . . . but what if the Beta could be made to work the way Van de Vliet theorized it might? Was there the possibility the music would never stop?
Nursing a second Glenfiddich, he looked around the room, the third‑floor study/bedroom, finding it pleased him as always. This room of his five‑story mansion was a handmade gem from New York's turn‑of‑the‑century Gilded Age, with molded plasterwork ceilings and brass doorknobs and mahogany paneling. Favorites from his superlative Japanese sword collection lined the walls, giving him constant joy. He wanted to live to enjoy it for another three score and ten.
The only galling thing about the place was that he had to share it with Eileen, who had the top two floors. They had been living in marital purgatory for the past twenty‑eight years, ever since she found out about the existence of his natural son. Because of that humiliation, she had refused to give him the one thing he most wanted from her, his freedom. She let it be known that as long as he flaunted a string of mistresses in the cheap tabloid press, she was determined to stay in his face.
He sighed and took a last sip of his scotch, then set it down and clicked on the phone. Van de Vliet had rented a small villa half a mile down the lakeshore, south from the institute, and he lived alone. Until recently he'd been sleeping in the lab. There was no encrypted phone where he lived, so this had damned well better be brief.
"Karl, it's me. How did it go today with the new Beta prospect? I contracted her to do some work here, hoping to do my part to get her with the program. I was expecting to hear from you by now."
"I've met with her and she had a stress test this afternoon in the city. Other than the aortic stenosis, she seems to be in superb shape, which is important. I'm assuming—make that hoping—that she'll come back in the morning and formally enter the clinical trials. I'll let you know if she does. Till that happens, I have no progress to report."
"All right, but how soon after that do you think you could get started with the Beta matter?"
There was a pregnant pause, and then . . .
"W.B., we truly need to talk, and maybe not on this line. Just before I left the lab, I ran another simulation on the Mothership to try to figure out what dosage level of Beta enzyme would be safe. But it's like trying to extrapolate backwards, and I just don't have enough data. I'm beginning to wonder if using her to try to create telomerase antibodies is actually such a good idea. It's just so risky. . . ." His voice trailed off.
"Karl, everything in life is a goddam risk. I know I'm supposed to be the beneficiary here, but if the antibody concept works out, we might still be able to do something for... Beta One."
"I'm already doing everything I know how for her. That's a tragedy we're all still in denial about. And now we're talking about risking yet another woman. Yes, maybe it's the answer, but for now I don't know what a safe dosage of enzyme should be. It has to be enough to generate the antibodies, but not so great that . . . You know what I'm talking about."
I sure as hell do, Bartlett thought. I'm looking at the Syndrome myself.
"Karl, just think of what it could mean if you could get the Beta to work the way the other procedures do. What great medical discovery didn't have a few missteps at the beginning? This is experimental medicine that could change the world. So, dammit, we've got to take risks."
"Why are we having this conversation at this time of night? Over an unsecure phone?"
"Because we don't have a lot of time," Bartlett growled.
"We've got nineteen days left on the clinical trials. That's certainly enough time to conclude the procedure on her heart. But if we also try to—"
"Karl," Bartlett said "it's the Beta we should be focusing on. I'm looking at the Syndrome myself now, though I think I've got the strength of will to handle it. My mind is a lot stronger than Kris . . . Beta One's. But I don't want to have to find out. You've got to get this fucking problem fixed."
"If we do use her, I can't begin to tell you how unethical this is about to become."
Bartlett wanted to remind Van de Vliet that ethics were the least of their problems at the moment, but that wasn't the kind of thing you aired over an unsecure phone connection.
"Karl, just fucking do it," he said finally. "If she's not under way with the Beta before the end of this week, ethics are not going to be your primary concern. I may have to revisit some of our agreements. Cross me and you forfeit a lot."
"All right" He sighed. "I know what I can do to make sure she's in."
"Good. Do it, whatever it is." He now had to warn Van de Vliet about Stone Aimes, but how much information should he provide? He quickly decided to keep it simple. "Oh, and as though we didn't already have enough problems, there's something else I need to alert you about. There's a smart‑ass reporter from the New York Sentinel nosing around. Yesterday he got to my legal department and asked about Beta One, though he doesn't know her name yet. He somehow found out she was terminated from the clinical trials. Please tell me you haven't been talking to the press behind my back."
"My God, I've been waiting for this to happen." Van de Vliet sounded like someone who had just had the wind knocked out of him. "You know, Grant once mentioned that a reporter had been pestering him about getting an interview with me."
"When?"
"Maybe two months ago, possibly three."
"First I've heard about it," Bartlett said. "I wish he'd told me. I could have taken steps."
"It might be the same person. Now that I think about it, I do remember he mentioned the Sentinel. How much do you think he knows?"
"I'm not sure. The question in my mind is, how did he find out about her in the first place? He's supposedly doing a book about us, Karl, a book about this project."
"Well, that's the first I've heard about that. Christ! A book!”
"I think he's just fishing at the moment. But this should be a warning. We've got to keep security tight."
"What do you know about him? Is he good?"
Yes, Bartlett thought, he's damned good. The truth is, I'm almost proud of him sometimes.
"He's the medical columnist for the paper. So happens, I own the building where their editorial offices are."
"I don't have time to read newspapers."
"Well, he's good enough that we may have to handle him somehow."
"What are you trying to say?" Van de Vliet asked, though he sounded like he already knew.
"What I'm saying is, he's a pro, and I get the strong impression he's hungry."
"Hungry for money or for fame?"
"If I knew that, I'd know what to do next," Bartlett said. Probably some of both, he thought, if the kid is anything like his old man.
"Then why don't we give him an interview? Meet the whole matter head‑on. I've always found it better to shape the news yourself rather than trying to stonewall, which usually means a lot of speculation ends up getting published and then you have to correct it after the fact. It's also the best way to find out how much a reporter already knows."
Idiot, Bartlett thought, that's the worst possible thing we could do. This kid would have your balls for a bow tie.
"Karl, you've just provided a perfect illustration of why I have my own people handling the press. Some amateur like you starts talking to a guy like that, and the next thing you know, you might as well be on sodium pentathol. Again, his name is Stone Aimes. Remember it. And don't ever even think about exchanging a single word with him."
"W.B., my experience is that you can only stonewall the press for so long, if they're any good at all. Sooner or later, they're going to find out more than you want them to. The only way to forestall that is to parcel them carefully controlled information to work with. Trust me. I've had a little experience with reporters too. You can't treat them like they're complete dolts. You have to co‑opt them, bring them into your confidence, and then convince them that it's in everybody's interest for them to help you rather than harm you. So why don't you let me talk to this guy? We could always start off with the carrot and then move on to the stick."
"This conversation is making me very nervous, Karl. I don't want you or any of your people within a mile of him. I mean it, goddamit."
With which Winston Bartlett slammed down the phone.
"Shit."
What are we going to do? So far, Van de Vliet hadn't helped Kristen in the slightest. Okay, she wanted to try the Beta, but still . . . What happened was a tragedy.
And who are we kidding—Stone wasn't going to back off.
Seeing his natural (and only) son again after a lot of years had shaken him up more than he had expected. At some level he wanted to feel proud of his own flesh and blood.
But now . . . if anything got published about the Syndrome, the financial consequences could be devastating. Stone Aimes had to be kept at bay long enough to complete the buyout. Unfortunately, it might come to involve force.
He smiled to think that Kenji Noda would be ready for that challenge.
But overt violence really wasn't Winston Bartlett's style. At least it hadn't been his style up to now. But he was staring at the horrific possibility of the Syndrome. Starting very soon, a lot of things might have to be handled differently.
Wednesday, April 8
1O:15 a.m.
Ally was walking down the second‑floor marble hallway of the Dorian Institute, feeling a mixture of hope and dread. She’d parked her blue Toyota in the same slot she’d done the day before, and then she’d gone through the security check at the front entrance, which included verifying (again) a solid ID and a check for any kind of camera or recording equipment. Maria did not come along; she was using this as an occasion to have some well‑deserved time off with her grandchild. The caregiver was giving herself some care.
The downstairs foyer had been empty except for security and staff, and she’d paused just long enough to sign in and ask the receptionist at the central desk which room Nina Hampton was in. Was her mother going to be as enthusiastic about being here today as she’d been yesterday? Truthfully, just to see her spirits immediately improve yesterday was a high in itself. But who knew? Maybe she could be helped.
"I think she's . . . Let me check." She'd pulled up a computer screen. "Right. Mrs. Hampton is in room two‑thirteen, second floor." She'd looked up and smiled. "Your mother, I assume. She's quite a card. I hear she's doing very well. You can use the elevator over there."
"I'll take the stairs," Ally had said. They were wide and blue marble and had a kind of splendor as they seemed to literally flow down from the upstairs landing. "I didn't have my run this morning."
The marble hallway upstairs showed no signs of use. The place felt more like a grandiose palace from another time than a hospital doing cutting‑edge research. There was a nurse's station at the far end of the hall and two women were there in blue uniforms. Other than that, however, there was nothing to suggest the Dorian Institute was a medical facility. It could easily have been an exclusive resort hotel. It didn't feel medical or aseptic in any way.
Stone should see this, she thought. He'd definitely be impressed.
Driving out this morning, alone, she'd been thinking about him a lot. There was something about him that was different from what she'd remembered over all the years. He was as serious as ever about his work, but she suspected he might possibly be more fun now that he seemed to have lightened up some. He used to be wound extremely tight. In any case, she was finding herself surprisingly happy to talk to him again, whether or not it went any further.
But was his concern about the mysterious terminated patient justified? And what, if anything, did that have to do with her?
She was still musing about that when she heard the Spanish‑ language TV going in room 213, even before she touched the doorknob. That's a good sign, she thought.
She pushed open the door and strode in. The room was decorated in earth tones, including a lovely brown hand‑woven carpet, which had Indian symbols in it, probably Navajo. The bed was a single, but it was faux Early American, not a hospital bed. Again the place felt more like a resort than a research institute.
Nina was sitting up, leaning against the headboard, and wearing blue silk pajamas underneath a white bed coat.
"Mom, how're you feeling? You look great."
It was true. She was wearing a lull complement of makeup and her hair looked like it'd been newly washed. Whatever else was going on, the Dorian Institute was making sure patients looked their best. Do they have a beautician on staff ? she wondered. Also, there was a sparkle in her mother's eyes that she hadn't seen since before her father died.
"How does it look like I'm feeling?" Nina reached for the remote and muted the sound from the TV
Yes, that old twinkle is definitely there.
"Gee, I have to say that you seem a lot better than you did yesterday." It was true, thank goodness. She was having one of those supercogent days.
She laughed deep and resonant. "Ally, you have no idea. He started in with the injections yesterday evening, after you left. When I woke up this morning, I could remember everything that happened yesterday. I even remembered why I was in this strange place. Try me. Ask me something and see if I can remember it. Go ahead. Ask me anything."
"Okay." She thought a moment. It should be something easy. "When was Dad's birthday?"
"March twelfth." She didn't even hesitate. "You'll have to do better than that."
"How about my birthday? You couldn't remember it last week."
Nina paused and looked disoriented for a moment. Uh‑oh, Ally thought, I pushed her too hard.
"It was October third." A smile abruptly took over her face, as though she was experiencing a live breakthrough. "You were born at Roosevelt Hospital, at three‑forty in the afternoon."
"Mom, this is incredible." She was joyously stunned though it felt like something resembling shock. "It's a miracle."
"Your mother's responsiveness is impressive," Karl Van de Vliet said as he strode through the open door, startling her. "Ellen will run the first battery of monitoring tests later this morning. Short‑term memory and the like. But from all appearances, there's been a lot of tissue regeneration under way overnight."
"Is . . . is this permanent?" Ally asked, not wanting to let herself get her hopes up too soon. And what is he doing?
"No one can answer that question." He looked at Nina and smiled. "But this is not some drug regimen to trick the brain's chemistry, Mrs. Hampton, you have my word. In Alzheimer's, tissue responsible for the production of certain neurotransmitters dies. What we're doing here is enabling your brain to regrow healthy, long‑lived tissue to replace what has become damaged and destroyed by an excess of the wrong . . . Let's just say we're not trying to salvage damaged tissue. We're actually replacing the dysfunctional tissue in the cortical and hippocampal regions of the brain, so we're working with the body. And you're responding wonderfully." He turned back to Ally. "I've got to get back to the lab now. Come on down when you're ready, and we'll finish the paperwork."
She started to say she wanted to ask him to linger a moment and answer a few questions, but before she could, he'd disappeared into the hallway.
"Ally, I haven't felt this alive in months," Nina bubbled on. "Dr. Vee did a minor procedure late yesterday afternoon, using local anesthesia. Then he did something in his laboratory and came back and gave me an injection. Then there was another one this morning. It's supposed to continue for a week or two. Ellen said she'll be giving me one of those little memory tests every day to see if I'm improving, but you know, I already know I can tell a difference. It's just been overnight, but I swear some of the haze is already gone."
"I'm so happy for you." Ally felt a surge of joy. Already she was thinking about some new trips they could take together.
"Come over here and sit by me," she said, patting the bed. "I was thinking about Arthur again this morning. If Doctor Vee can do something for your heart, it would be a miracle that would have meant so much to him. It's just so sad he can't be here to see this."
As Ally settled next to her, Nina reached over and took her hand. "I want to ask you something, darling. Just between us. Why do you think Seth . . . Grant is doing this for me, for us?"
"What do you mean?" Ally was trying to read her thoughts, wondering where the topic was headed. Nina had declared on Sunday that she thought there was something evil about Grant. Now this.
"I hate to say it about my own son, but caring is not his first nature."
"Mom, we see him so seldom, do you really think either one of us still understands him?"
Nina and Grant had never been all that close. In fact, he'd always been something of a secretive loner within the family, even though he was very much an extrovert with his friends, of which he had many, or at least used to. Ally had left for college just as he reached high school, which meant she wasn't around during his impressionable teen years. And when she came back to take over CitiSpace, he was virtually a fugitive from the family.
"I remember plenty about him. You think I don't know my own son, Lord help me."
"Well, Mom, I'm not really prepared to talk about him. It was so upsetting just to see him, I couldn't really take everything in." She smiled and touched Nina's brow, which felt warm and flush. "But I'll tell you something I am taking in. You're really looking great. I don't know what he's doing, but—"
"Hope, darling. It's the greatest tonic in the world even if there's no good reason for it." She squeezed Ally's hand. "And I do so wish Arthur could be here now. I miss him so much."
"I know, Mom. He was as much a friend to me as he was a dad" She thought back fondly over her father's many passions and how she'd shared a lot of them with him. One had been the nineteenth‑century Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth and Shelley. Then he'd had his astronomy period and they'd spent a lot of time together at the planetarium. But he took an interest in her passions as well. When at age eight she decided to collect coins, he went to the bank and brought back rolls and rolls of dimes and nickels for her to go through. And during the summertime he'd take her and Grant on the LIRR to Long Beach, every other Sunday, all summer long.
That was why the pain, the personal loss, of his horrible death had never fully subsided. Perhaps it never would. But the difference between them was that he had finally lost his will to live, whereas Ally found her own will growing all the more with every new adversity she faced. The weaker her heart got, the more determined she was to exercise, whatever it took, to make it strong again.
"He would be so proud of the way you pulled CitiSpace back from the brink." She let a tear slide down her left cheek, smearing her makeup. "And I'll tell you something else, young lady. You take after us both when it comes to guts. My memory may be slipping, but I remember you were always willing to take chances. And I guess that's what we're doing here now. Both of us. We're gambling on life. In your case, you've got a lot to lose."
Ally looked at her. Nina was having one of her moments of incredible lucidity, but how did she know so much about what was really going on.
"Mom, did the doctor tell you what I—"
"The head nurse, Ellen, told me that you're going to undergo a procedure for your heart. That you're going to start today." Her eyes darkened. "She also admitted he'd never used the procedure on a condition like yours. It's completely experimental."
"You talked to her this morning?"
"She took me downstairs, where they did my hair. She said Dr. Vee thinks it's important for everyone here to have a positive attitude. They ask you what you’d like and then they try to do it. Now I'm ready for whatever comes next." She stared directly into Ally's eyes. "But that doesn't mean I still can't be nervous about all this untried stuff."
"Mom, don't worry about me. I'm going to get through this. If you'll be strong for me, I promise I'll be strong for you."
She got up and walked to the window. From this vantage she could just see the lake down through the trees. They were starting to put out leaves, but it was still early spring and nippy here, so they mostly had just buds. All the same, there was a sense of renewal about them, which made her think of her own body.
"Life is so bittersweet." Nina sighed. "But you still want to go on living, even when it's a daily struggle. Either I'm an optimist or I'm pigheaded."
"You're just wonderful," Ally said. "That's what you are."
She glanced down at her watch. She was scheduled to meet Ellen O'Hara downstairs at ten forty‑five, to fill out the paperwork that formally entered her into the clinical trials. If she decided to go ahead and enroll, this would be her last day of freedom. Tomorrow she would have to begin the intense phase of the therapy. Did she really want to do that? She wanted to talk to Van de Vliet one last time. "Look, Mom, I'm going to be downstairs for a while now, but I'll come back up later."
"All right. Ellen said there's a little library here somewhere, so I may go down and look. I might even get something in Spanish, to try and keep my mind alert." She sighed. "Oh, Ally, I so want to be the way I was again. Pray for me."
Ally knew prayer wasn't something her mother engaged in a lot. In fact, she'd always been a fervent agnostic. What had brought about the change? Was it that she'd finally discovered that both her body and mind had limits and wouldn't do what she wanted forever?
"I'll pray for us both, Mom. But we're going to be okay. I have faith."
"Good for you." She looked away. "I'll try to have it too."
Ally walked over and kissed her, then turned and headed out the door. Where was this all going to end? She had absolutely no idea. But with Nina's miracle change overnight, the concern she'd heard in the voice of Stone Aimes seemed a million miles away.
As she walked down the marble stairs, she tried to take the measure of the place. The Dorian Institute did inspire you with its look of utter perfection. It was an appropriate setting for miracles.
When she got to the lobby, she saw Ellen stepping off the elevator, coming up from the basement.
"All set to get going?" she asked, walking over. "Before we start any procedures, anything at all, we've got to fill out the forms for the NIH. Technically, what is going on here is a clinical trial, a very detailed study in which we constantly monitor the patients and try to measure their progress objectively. So we'll have to take some time and establish a very thorough baseline. We began that yesterday when you went to the clinic in New York for a stress test. Among other things, we'll be running an EKG on you here on a daily basis."
"And all this goes into my NIH files?" Ally asked. They were getting on the elevator to go down.
"Not the raw data. It's our job to structure our patients' files in ways that will permit the NIH monitor, or other third parties, to assess our results quickly."
They were getting off now, entering the starkly lit hallway that connected the laboratory and Dr. Van de Vliet's office with the examination rooms.
"Dr. Vee is working in the lab this morning, so we can use his office to fill out all the forms."
Ally could see Dr. Van de Vliet and three other people, members of his research team, all dressed in white, clustered around a blackboard, where he was drawing some kind of flowchart. Again she was struck by his youthful appearance. He surely did not look a day older than forty, or forty‑five tops.
This was the first time she had been in his office, and she paused to look around. As was usual, he had a wall of framed diplomas and certificates. From her cursory checkout, they seemed to correspond to the educational history she remembered from his CV. It was a spacious room, with an executive feeling, and he had an expensive fiat‑screen nineteen‑inch monitor sitting on the left‑hand side of his desk. Next to it was a wooden table and chairs. A pile of NIH forms was there, along with a green raku mug, filled with ballpoint pens.
"He likes to let people use his office whenever possible," Ellen explained. "It's a lot less institutional than the conference room."
Ally settled at the table and picked up the form.
"They want a lot of personal information," Ellen went on, "but your mother and I filled out her items yesterday and it wasn't too hard. Needless to say, all personal information is completely confidential. Even your name. After the first week, we only identify you with a coding system."
As Ally was reaching for a pen, a petite blond woman with a smashing figure strode through the door. She was wearing a lab coat, not a nurse's uniform, but it still showed off her curves. She was carrying a stainless‑steel tray containing a hypodermic needle and three glass vials.
"Hi," she said with a smile, "I'm Dr. Connolly. Welcome to the Dorian Institute. We're all very excited about having you here."
"Deb, come in," Ellen said seeming slightly startled "Is there something we forgot to—"
"No, I just need to take one hundred fifty milliliters of blood. We've got to get started on the cultures we'll be using
ASAP."
"Hang on a second" Ally said. "I was hoping to talk this over a bit more with Dr. Van de Vliet before I take the final leap."
"You're free to dither as much as you like," Dr. Debra
Connolly said, her smile vanishing, "but our programs are on a schedule."
"I'd still—"
"I'll just be taking a small amount of blood. We can then get started on the cultures while you talk." She was already swabbing Ally's arm and feeling for a vein. "Now make a fist."
Ally hated giving blood and to distract herself she glanced around the office, trying to construct a life story for Dr. Karl Van de Vliet. Then she noticed a photo of him and a woman standing together on a bridge, next to a sign that said Charles river, which meant Boston, and they were holding hands and smiling.
The odd thing was, the cars behind them were models at least fifteen years old, yet he looked just the same as he did today.
Whoa. There it is again. That odd age thing. There is something very strange about this man. She finally got up her courage to ask.
"Dr. Connolly, do you know how old Dr. Van de Vliet is? He looks so young."
"There are some things it's not polite to ask." She was capping off the vial and reaching for a second. Her voice had grown genuinely frosty.
"Frankly, I don't see why. He knows everything there is to know about me. He has all my files."
"You could ask at the front desk for one of our brochures. I'm sure it would clear up any questions you have." She attached the second vial to the needle.
"I've seen it. I know when he went to school and all that. But still—"
"If you really want to know personal things, you might just ask him yourself. You two seem to get along so well."
What is with her? Ally puzzled. Why is she being so hostile and negative? And why that little jab about "getting along"? The truth was, Debra Connolly could have been a runway model, but in a lab coat her blondness and figure just intensified her bitchiness.
Okay, maybe the question about his age wasn't overly relevant, more a matter of idle curiosity. But how did he do it? Every woman alive would like to know. Maybe the story Grant had told about Van de Vliet and his experimental skin treatment was actually true. She hadn't put much stock in it at the time, but seeing him out here in the flesh . . ."
"There's actually something else I was curious about. Was a patient dropped from the trials a few months back? I was wondering if you could tell me anything about that."
"What have you heard that would make you ask such a question?" Debra Connolly's face went blank, but her blue eyes registered alarm. "No one here is allowed to discuss specific cases. That would be a violation of NIH rules and highly unethical. What made you ask that question?"
Hey, why so defensive? Could it be Stone is on to something that needs more daylight?
"I did a little research on the Gerex Corporation and . . ." Then she had an inspired hunch. "You know, the NIH has a Web site where they post all the clinical trials they have under way." This was actually something she knew to be true. She had used the site to look up information about possible clinical trials for Alzheimer's patients that might accept her mother. But she never could find any in the New York area that seemed to offer any hope. "So naturally, your study was there. I like to know as much as I can about what I'm getting into."
"I've been to that Web site many times. The public part doesn't include—"
"So, has a patient ever been terminated?" Ally cut her off, hoping to avoid being caught in a lie. "If so, I'd really like to know why."
"No one is allowed to discuss any details of the clinical studies." She was capping off the last vial of blood the three cylinders of red against the steel.
"I think I'm going to have a talk with Dr. Van de Vliet before I go any further with this program," Ally said feeling her temper and her warning instincts both ratchet up. "I feel like I'm being stonewalled."
"You're free to think what you like." Debra Connolly had turned and was brusquely heading for the doorway when it was blocked by another blonde this one in her late fifties, who was standing in the threshold and brandishing a black automatic pistol. Her eyes were wild. The security guard from the entrance and the nurse from the front desk upstairs were both cowering behind her.
"Where's Kristen?" she demanded. "Where's my daughter? I know she's alive, goddam you. I've come to take her home."
Wednesday, April 8
11:03 a.m.
"Who are you and how did you get in here?" Debra Connolly demanded backing away from the door and quickly settling her steel tray onto a table. Ally got the instant impression that Deb knew exactly who she was.
The woman's hair was an ash blond tint above dark roots and was clipped short in a curt style. Her troubled face had stress lines, and her heavy makeup reminded Ally of a younger Sylvia Miles or perhaps a particularly intense real estate agent, except that real estate agents don't charge in on you brandishing a Beretta.
"It's all been a lie," the woman declared her cigarette‑fogged voice shrill. If she recognized Debra, it wasn't apparent.
Ellen hit a button on the desk and spoke into the intercom. "Dr. Vee, could you please come to your office immediately. It's an emergency. There's someone here who—"
"You're damned right it's an emergency," the woman barked at her.
"Hadn't you better give me the gun?" Debra asked, holding out her hand and stepping toward her.
The woman turned and trained the pistol on her. "Just back off, sister. And keep out of this. I know you work for him but you're just a flunky."
"Then could you at least keep your voice down," Debra Connolly said, her composure hard as ice. The jab had bounced right off. Underneath the beauty pageant exterior she was all steel and sinew. "There are patients upstairs...."
The hapless security man who'd been trailing behind the woman had gone over to the positive‑pressure door of the laboratory and was desperately banging on the glass and waving for Dr. Van de Vliet. A moment later, he strode out, still wearing his white lab jacket.
"You," the woman hissed, turning to meet him. "You're the one who has her. You and that bastard Bartlett."
"Madam, I must ask you to leave," he said warily as he came up to her. "Immediately." He glanced down at the pistol. "Otherwise I'll have to call the police."
Although he was giving the impression that the woman was just an anonymous annoyance, Ally was sure she caught a glimmer of recognition, and a patina of poorly disguised panic, in his eyes.
"I want to see Kristen, damn you. I want to know what you've done with her. To her. You and that bastard Winston Bartlett who got her into—"
"Kristen?" He seemed puzzled. Then he appeared to remember. "There was a patient here briefly a while back, who I believe was named—"
"Kristen Starr. That's right, you fucker. And you damned well do remember her. And me. She's my daughter. Where is she?"
My God, Ally thought, could she mean that Kristen Starr, the one who had an interview show on cable. The world around this institute just keeps getting smaller.
Ally had actually done an interior‑design project for Kristen
Starr back when she was first getting up to speed at CitiSpace. It was one of her first jobs. At that time Kristen had just signed a two‑year contract with E! and she wanted to renovate her co‑op in Chelsea. But then just as the job was completed, she sold the place and moved to a brownstone in the West Village, or so she'd said. Ally didn't know why she had done it or where precisely she had moved to, but she got the impression some very rich new sugar daddy was setting her up and he wanted the privacy of a town house.
Could it be that Kristen was the mysterious missing patient Stone was trying to locate and interview? Ally hadn't seen her on TV for a while, so maybe she had moved on to other things.
"I really don't know where she is now," Van de Vliet said. "She became emotionally unstable in the middle of her treatment. It's a rarity but it has happened. She checked out. After that, I don't—"
"That's a damned lie," the woman declared. "I know it now. That's what your receptionists have been telling everybody. It sounded a little like her at first, but now I realize it's preposterous. She didn't just up and run off. You're keeping her somewhere. Where is she? Where's my only child?"
"Wherever she is, I can assure you she's most assuredly not here," Van de Vliet intoned smoothly, even as his eyes struggled to stay calm. "Would that she were. She wanted... a procedure done and I think we were having some success. But then she became traumatized for some reason best known to her and insisted on leaving. No one is forced to complete the regimen here against their will. As best I recall, someone said she went to a spa in New Mexico."
"I know that's what your flunkies have been telling me over the phone. That she went to New Mexico to hide out. But now I know everybody lied to me. For the last three years she's been sleeping with that bastard Winston Bartlett, but now his office won't even return my phone calls. You all think you're so smart, but I could smuggle a gun past your guards. In my bra!" Her eyes had acquired a further kind of wildness now as she awkwardly began opening her purse, hanging from a shoulder strap, with her left hand while still holding the pistol in her right. "And I got a letter from her just this morning. The postmark is New York City. So—"
"What—" Van de Vliet's eyes began to blink rapidly.
"She's not in New Mexico now. If she ever was." The woman waved a small tan envelope at him. There was large, loopy writing on the outside.
"Could . . . could I see that?" He started to reach for it, but she waved the black Beretta at him and shoved the letter back into her purse.
"No you can't. What you can do is tell me where the hell you're keeping her. Now."
"Before we proceed any further, that gun really isn't necessary," Van de Vliet said as he reached and deftly seized her wrist. He was quick, and his quickness seemed to spook her, because just as he turned the pistol away, it discharged.
The round went astray, ricocheting off a metal lighting fixture at the end of the hallway and into the wall. The hapless, unarmed guard who'd followed her downstairs yelled and dived behind a large potted corn plant near the office door. Both Ellen O'Hara and Debra Connolly just stared, momentarily too stunned to move.
Ally stepped toward the woman, wanting to help Van de Vliet disarm her. She was feeling her heart race dangerously upward.
Van de Vliet was still struggling with the woman when the Beretta discharged again. This time it was aimed downward, at the hard tile floor, and the ricochet was not so harmless. The round bounced back and caught the woman in the chest knocking her sideways. Van de Vliet unsuccessfully grabbed for her as she crumpled. Ally reached for her too, but by that time she was already on the floor. Ally pulled the hot pistol from her fingers, then turned and handed it to Ellen.
"Here. For God's sake, do something with this." She realized she had never actually held a real pistol before.
Blood was flowing across the floor as Van de Vliet and Debra Connolly began tearing open the woman's blouse. The bullet appeared to have entered her chest just below the rib cage, a jagged wound caused by the projectile's tumble and splattered shape, and then exited a few inches away, at her side. She had passed out.
"Get a gurney now," he yelled to Ellen. "We've got to get her into OR one and try to do something about the bleeding."
My God, Ally marveled what desperation drove her to threaten him with a gun when she obviously didn't know the first thing about how to use it?
The woman's open purse was lying no more than two feet from where she had fallen. With the hallway rapidly filling as nurses from upstairs poured off the elevator, no one was paying any attention to anything but the prostrate woman.
Get the letter, Ally!
She gingerly moved over to where the purse was resting and peeked in. There was a jumble of the usual things: cosmetics, a ballpoint, a change purse, an address book, and a billfold. There also was the tan envelope. Yes!
The scene in the hallway was increasingly chaotic. Two of the researchers from the laboratory had come out, in their sterile whites, with disinfectant and a roll of bandages. As they began to bind her wound to stanch the bleeding, her eyelids fluttered and she groaned.
"She's just in shock," Van de Vliet said with relief. "Ellen, page Michael and tell him to bring the ambulance around front. Just in case. But I think we can handle this here."
Now two nurses were rolling a gurney off the elevator. While Van de Vliet and the two lab researchers lifted her onto it, Ally realized that nobody seemed to think that calling the police—about any of this—would be a constructive step.
She pulled out the letter and examined it. The oversize script on the front read Katherine Starr, 169 East 81st St. There was no return address.
Katherine Starr. She was repeating the name and address, trying to lodge them in her memory, while she was pulling the letter out of the tan envelope.
It was in the same rotund script as the address:
Dear Whoever You Are,
I think you 're my mother but I'm not sure. Please help me. I don't know where I am or what my name is. But I found a bracelet with Starr on it and I looked in the phone book. Your name sounded kind of familiar. I think I'm . . .
"I'd better take that," Van de Vliet said, lifting the letter out of Ally's hands. "All her personal effects should be kept with her."
"Dr. Vee, OR one is open," Ellen was saying as she marched down the hall toward them. "Debra has the IV and oxygen ready."
"Good," he said, glancing at her for a second. As he did, Ally reached into Katherine Starr's purse and palmed the small black address book.
Then Van de Vliet turned back to her. "Let me see about her bleeding and then I'll try to explain. I now remember this woman all too well. It's all coming back like a bad dream I'd repressed. I pegged her as schizophrenic the minute I saw her, when she came here and tried to talk her daughter into leaving. She's paranoid and—"
"What was Kristen Starr here for?" Ally asked. "I actually did an interior‑design job for her a few years back and she never mentioned any health issues."
"Actually nothing," he declared quickly. "She was having an early midlife crisis. I gather she'd had some kind of television program and her contract wasn't renewed. She'd decided it was because of her appearance." He shrugged and gestured with empty palms, Iike, How absurd but that's the way some women are. "It turned out we had a . . . mutual acquaintance who told her about the stem cell procedure here at the institute. When he brought her in, I wasn't in a position to turn her away."
"That wouldn't be Winston Bartlett, by any chance?"
He nodded. "As a matter of fact. He writes the checks, so he has a certain amount of influence around here. As it happened, I had experimented with a procedure some years ago involving stem cells and the epidermis. There seemed to be a regenerative effect. And I thought there was a reasonable chance she might respond to it. Since we had clinical trials for other stem cell procedures already under way, it was easy to fit her in. But I had a lot more important things going on at the time than her cosmetic work, so I didn't pay much attention to her. Then she abruptly left, and since then I've had so much else happening, I just haven't thought about her."
"Was it not working? Is that why she left?"
"Some of the staff swore it was having results. The truth is, I wasn't following her very closely. In my honest opinion, stem cell technology shouldn't be used for cosmetic purposes. It borders on the obscene."
Whoa, Ally thought, according to Grant, you "experimented " with a procedure for the skin on yourself. And you've got the youthful‑looking skin to prove it. Let's not have the pot calling the kettle black here.
"But if it was working, then why did she decide to stop?"
This story sounds way too pat, she thought.
"You'll have to ask someone closer to her. Maybe she didn't think it was."
"How about Winston Bartlett. I gather he's pretty close."
"Well, she's a touchy subject with him. Good luck." Van de Vliet hesitated and his face flushed. "But now I really have to get in there. I'm responsible for whatever happens around here. Particularly whatever bad that happens."
He was heading down the hall.
"One last thing. If Kristen is here in New York, then how could I contact her?"
"I have absolutely no idea," he said over his shoulder. "If her own mother couldn't find . . . Actually, you might check with the front desk. All clinical trial participants are here under a confidentiality agreement, which means that giving out any information about her would be a liability issue, but now . . . See if they have a prior address they can give you. After she left, it never occurred to me to pursue her."
He was going through a door marked OR 1, but then he revolved back. There was a darkness in his eyes she hadn't seen before. "I guess I'm wondering why, exactly, you're so interested in this deranged girl. It has no bearing whatsoever on your own treatment."
"It's just something I'm curious about." She stopped, her emotions in a jumble. What is going on? "You know, I'm wondering if maybe we shouldn't start my procedure later in the week. All this . . . guns and shooting . . . is a bit much for me to take in." She looked at him. "I guess I can't remember ever seeing anyone pull a pistol on their doctor before."
"I can understand your disquiet," he said, his eyes dimming even more, "but I'd really hoped we could get started today. I should be free in an hour or so and we can—"
"I've given the blood sample you wanted, but I've just had the fright of my life. I want to go up and see Mom again and then I want a day to recharge."
Get hold of Stone, she was thinking, and then try to find Kristen. Something feels very non‑kosher here.
"Just be aware," he went on, "that this procedure can't wait forever. I told you that we have less than three weeks left. At the end of the month, the clinical trials will be completed and this facility could be temporarily closed because of corporate restructuring."
What is he talking about, "corporate restructuring"? You 're pressuring me again, she thought. I really don't like that.
"It can wait for a day."
"All right. If you must. But that's it. We have to start tomorrow. Seriously." He came back and reached and took her hand. "This means a lot to me, Alexa. I really want to help you. And I truly think we can."
With that, he turned and walked into the OR.
She stood watching for a moment, and when he was definitely gone, she took the small black leather volume out of her waistband.
On a hunch she opened it to the first page and... sure enough, there it was, penciled in down one side: Kristy 555‑ 1224. No last name and no address.
The rest of the book had only a dozen entries, so few that Ally wondered why Katherine Starr bothered carrying it. Compulsive, maybe.
She couldn't wait to get to her car and get on the phone to Stone.
Kristen Starr could well be the mystery patient he was looking for. In any event, she was missing, freaked out, unsure who she was, and probably in a lot of trouble.
But now they had a phone number.
[Chapter 19]
Wednesday, April 8
12:32 p.m.
"You think you've got what?" Stone Aimes sounded like he'd just won the lottery. "For the patient who was 'terminated'? My God, Ally, you're incredible."
"Possibly. But what I know I am is very worried. For one thing, if this is the person you're looking for, the one who got dropped from the trials, it's somebody you've probably heard of, and for another, I've just had a series of very disturbing experiences. . . ."
She'd called him on her cell phone the minute she cranked up her Toyota to return to the city. She couldn't get away from the Dorian Institute fast enough.
After leaving Karl Van de Vliet, she'd taken the elevator up to the second floor to check in on Nina.
"What's all the excitement?" her mother had asked. "One of the nurses just told me that a deranged woman with a gun barged into the lobby looking for Dr. Vee. Then she shot herself."
“It's nothing, Mom. Everything is all right now." She hadn't wanted to upset Nina, but she was convinced Karl Van de Vliet had just done some major lying. His uneasy body language told her he knew a lot more about Kristen Starr than he was admitting; for that matter, Debra Connolly probably did too.
"Well, thank goodness," Nina had said. "Are you going to start the procedure for your heart today?"
"Not yet. I want another day to think about it. But tell me how you're doing really. I mean, are you comfortable with how everything's going here? You can still stop if things don't feel right."
Ally half wanted to get her out of the Dorian Institute immediately. She didn't know what either of them had stumbled into. She just knew now that, along with the possibility of miracles, the Dorian Institute had a lot of questions that needed straight answers. She no longer trusted Karl Van de Vliet. She had seen his facade crack momentarily and what lay beneath it made her very uncomfortable.
Furthermore, she thought he realized she knew he was lying. And it seemed to make him even more desperate to keep her there.
"Ally, what a silly thing to say. Of course I want to stay." She'd fluffed up her pillow and reached for the TV remote. "Some of the smoke has already been blown out of my mind. I'm feeling clearer by the minute."
There's surely got to be some "placebo effect" at work here, Ally thought. But still, she does seem more aware.
"Okay, Mom, I'm going back into the city now. But I'll be here tomorrow and every day to check on you. Just don't . . . don't let them do anything to you that seems strange."
With that, she had given Nina a kiss on the forehead and taken the marble stairs down to the first‑floor reception.
It was now time to find Kristen Starr.
The nurse at the desk was a woman named May Gooden. The main floor had returned to normal after all the excitement, with patients passing through as they came back from the cafeteria.
Ally had decided to try a long shot and see if she could pry out any information about Kristen from the patient files. She asked point‑blank.
"I guess Dr. Van de Vliet was not aware of the legal strictures in our NIH agreement," May had said. "No personal information can be released without a patient's signed authorization."
"You do remember her being here, though? Kristen Starr."
"My Lord, that's not something that goes unnoticed. She had an assumed name but everybody knew who she was. A nice girl. Nicer than you'd expect from seeing her on television."
"So when, exactly, did she leave? Surely you can tell me that harmless piece of information? It was several months ago, right?"
May got a strange look in her eyes. "Who told you that?"
"I . . . I was downstairs when her mother showed up. I just got the impression that it was—"
May glanced furtively around. "I shouldn't be telling you this, but the truth is, I think she was still here until just a few days ago. She was down in intensive care. No nursing staff is allowed down there, just those medical‑research people he has working for him, what some of the nurses call the Gang of Four. But they brought her up in the elevator and then an ambulance took her away."
"When, precisely, was—"
"I've said too much already." She glanced around again. "And I can assure you that Kristen didn't sign an authorization to give out her personal information." She abruptly turned frosty and officious, as though rethinking how open she'd just been. What was she afraid of? "Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some things I need to do."
Ally had nodded and thanked her and split.
Thus the search had already produced an interesting factoid. Karl Van de Vliet was most assuredly engaged in the practice of a big lie about Kristen. . . .
"Maybe you should start by telling me about the disturbing experience," Stone was saying.
As the shadows of the trees that lined the leafy driveway glided past the Toyota's windshield she told him about Katherine Starr and Kristen Starr. She also told him the disparate versions of Kristen's departure as recounted by Van de Vliet and May Gooden.
"Sounds like they've got a situation," Stone declared. "They're trying to hide somebody who's well known. But you've got a number?"
"Like I said I palmed Katherine's little black book and it's got what could be the last known phone number for Kristen. Since she probably left the institute in an ambulance a few days ago, I doubt if she's at that number now, but it's someplace to start. I assume the area code is two‑one‑two. There're reverse directories where you can find the address for a phone number, right? In fact, I think there's a site on the Web that—"
"Leave that part to me. If the number's still good I'll have it in five minutes. Then I'll call you back and maybe you could meet me there, assuming it's somewhere in the city. Just give me your cell number."
She did and then clicked off the handset.
My God, she thought, that's the first time I've "given my number " to a man—not a business acquaintance—since Steve died. Okay, there were dinners with a couple of bachelor clients that turned out to be more than dinner. But neither relationship had lasted past a month. Both the men, nice guys, had complained she wasn't there for them—she wasn't—and had broken it off.
She meditated on that as she went through the iron gates (which opened automatically) and headed down the leafy, twisting roadway leading to the expressway.
She also found herself wondering what Stone Aimes was really like. There was an openness now that made her feel comfortable—though maybe that was just his deceptive reporter's manner, his calculating way of getting below her radar. He'd definitely picked up a few social skills over the past years. God knows he needed them.
Whatever was going on, it was good to have him around again. There was something different about talking to him than talking to Jennifer, though Ally wasn't quite sure what it was—and she was afraid to think too hard about it. But whatever that difference, it was one of the million reasons she so missed having Steve around.
Because if there ever was a time when she needed somebody to talk to . . .
Why am I thinking all this? she chided herself. I'm trying to psychoanalyze him and put him in a category when I don't know the first thing about what he's actually turned into after all this time. Is all the warmth and sincerity for real? Back in the old days he'd make nice whenever the stakes were low, but then when he had something on the line, he'd push as hard as he needed to get what he wanted.
Well, she reminded herself, I'm that way too. That was part of our problem.
The phone beeped.
"Voila," Stone's voice announced. "I got an address in the West Village. It's Two‑Seventeen West Eleventh Street. The phone is unlisted but it's billed to her name, so you were right about the number. And get this, it hadn't been turned off. So I thought, idiot, why don't you do the obvious and just try calling?"
"But her mother said she'd disappeared. . . ."
"Well, that's highly plausible. There's an answering machine there with a very strange message. It doesn't give a name, but it's a woman's voice and it's like a cri de coeur. She's away but she—quote—can't say where. You should listen to it."
Greenwood Lake Road had now become Skyline Drive,
for no discernible reason, and the traffic was picking up. Ally put on some speed and passed a truck.
"I'll do that. But we don't actually know for sure if it's the same Kristen Starr, though it surely has to be. Did you recognize her voice?"
"I've never watched her cable show. I just sort of know who she is. But you'd better listen to her announcement. How could there be two screwed‑up young women named Kristen Starr in the same town, even if it is New York?"
"I'll listen. It's got to be her, though. Give me the address." She hesitated a moment after he did then, "Would you like to meet me there? I think I could probably make it in an hour, or an hour and a quarter to be safe. We could ask around see if anybody in her building or the neighborhood has any idea what's going on with her. Maybe somebody's seen her."
"I was supposed to head into the office, but nothing could keep me away," he declared with enthusiasm.
A patrol car was speeding by in the opposite direction, siren blaring. She waited for the noise to subside.
"Great. I'll try for an hour. Unless the traffic really gets crazy. You never know what to expect at the GW Bridge, even in the middle of the day."
She clicked off the phone, then checked the number in the front of the black address book and punched it in.
The phone rang twice and then an answering machine started. The voice making the announcement sounded thin, tiny, and fragile. Just hanging on. It was the verbal equivalent of the loopy handwriting on the letter, a transparent attempt to bolster nonexistent courage.
"Hi. I'm away for now—I can't say where—and I'm not sure when I'll be back. But you can leave a message or whatever, in case I get a chance to pick them up at some point. Or you don't have to. That's okay too."
What an odd thing to say, Ally thought. It's like she s trying not to sound too needful.
But it was definitely the Kristen Starr. The slightly ditzy tone was right there.
Next came a long series of beeps as the machine proceeded to rewind.
This is surreal, she thought. I'm about to leave a message for a person who's God‑knows‑where.
While the machine beeped, she tried to rehearse what she wanted to say, to make it as non‑threatening as possible. Finally the machine stopped rewinding.
"Kristen, hi, my name is Ally Hampton. You may remember I did an interior‑design job for you when you lived in Chelsea. CitiSpace? I just met your mother. She got your letter." Should I tell her about the gun accident? Ally wondered. No, she's weirded‑out enough already. "Your real name is Kristen Starr. You seemed a little confused about that in your letter to her, which I read part of. You'd been at the Dorian Institute in New Jersey. Listen, it's really important to me, and to your mother, that you get in touch. I'd like to help you if I can, because from what I saw of your letter. . . Anyway, let me give you my cell phone number. If you pick this up, you can call me anytime, night or day. It's—"
"How did you get this number?" a frightened voice burst through. Ally recognized it, though it was nothing like the one she remembered from the confident, brassy TV personality that Kristen used to be. "I just got away and came here. And right after I got here, someone called my machine and then hung up. Are you tracking me? Who are you?"
"I . . ." Ally was so startled she couldn't think of anything to say immediately. "Kristen, is that you? I just saw your mother. I. . . I got this number from her. She came out to the Dorian Institute looking for you. She's very worried about—"
"You're lying to me. You're trying to trick me and get me back." She was breathing heavily, as though she'd just run a set of stairs. This is a person just barely holding it together, Ally thought. "Anyway, Kristen is not my name. My name is Kirby. They wrote it down for me and ... I'm very confused. I found a bracelet in my suitcase that had 'Starr' on it. Maybe that's my last name. It sounds right, but I can't remember—"
"You don't remember having a show on cable?"
"I . . . I think I knew someone who had a TV show, but I don't think it was me."
"Kirby . . . or whatever your . . . listen carefully. I think you were undergoing an experimental procedure for your skin. At a place in New Jersey called the Dorian Institute. The doctor was Karl Van de Vliet. You were in clinical trials for the National Institutes of Health. Then something happened and you left. Do you remember why you left? Or when?"
"No." She stifled a sob. "I can't remember anything."
Ally took a deep breath, not liking the vibes she was getting. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"No. I don't want to talk to you or to anybody. I got out of that place and—"
" 'That place'?" Ally asked. She was being passed by a huge bus and she could barely hear. "You mean the institute?"
"You know where I mean. And don't come looking for me down here either, because I'm not going to be here." Jesus, Ally thought, what's with her?
"Kris—Kirby, I'm not connected with anybody at the Dorian Institute. I'm supposed to become a patient there myself. I'm just trying to find out what happened to you when you underwent your treatment there."
"I can only remember little things." She was moaning. "There was this man. He said I could have anything I wanted. I trusted him. And now . . . I see faces but I can't remember who—"
"Kristen—that's your real name, by the way—can we meet? I promise you won't be harmed. I just—"
"You don't understand do you? You don't know what's happening to me." Her voice had begun to break. "It's the Beta. I don't know how long it's going to be before—"
"Before what? What beta? What are you—Kristen, we've
really got to meet. I mean it. I desperately need to talk to you. Maybe we could find another doctor, if that's what you need. Could I come down—"
"I have no idea who you are. You could be . . . He says they're trying to help me, but I'm not getting any better."
Ally was pulling onto the interstate, heading south. It was hard to concentrate on driving, but at the same time she wanted to push the speed limit. Kristen sounded like she was getting ready to disintegrate or flee.
Then she had another thought.
"Kristen, it's okay if you don't trust me. But could you tell me more about your . . . side effects? Are they—"
"I think that's why he moved me. To that place. But then he ..." She was growing even more agitated and impatient. "Look, I really can't talk anymore."
I'm losing her, Ally thought. Try to make her hang on.
"Kristen, would you please take my phone number? You sound like you could use a friend."
"Oh Christ, I'm so scared. I don't—"
"Just take it. No harm. Then if something happens and you want to—"
"All right," she said finally. 'Tell me and I'll write it down."
Ally gave it to her, then added, "I run an interior‑design firm. I actually did some work for you once, so we've met. You can call my office, so let me give you that number too. No way am I connected to the institute where you were."
She said she was writing it down.
"You know," Kristen went on, "I think this is God's way of punishing me for wanting something nobody should have." Then she began to sob again.
"How exactly—"
"I found a door that wasn't locked and I just came here. I don't know what guided me. And when I got to this street, I knew exactly which building it was. There was no name on my bell or anything, but I knew. I even knew who had my emergency key. It's like I have a sense memory of this apartment but I can't remember ever actually living here."
"Your name is Kristen Starr," Ally said again. "Try to remember that. And will you please stay there till I can get there and talk to you?" Then she made what she immediately realized was a fatal mistake. "There's a reporter, a sweet guy who's doing a book about . . . a medical procedure at the clinic where you were. And he's dying to talk to anybody who's been part of the clinical trials there. Could he talk to you too? It sounds like you've got quite a story to tell."
"You've got to be kidding. If they find me, I don't know what they'll do." And the connection was severed.
"Shit, don't do this." She quickly tried the cell phone number for Stone Aimes.
"It's me again. Listen, she's actually there. Kristen's in the apartment on West Eleventh Street. I just got off the phone with her. She's the one you want. But she's like a frightened rabbit. She said she was about to leave, but if you get there soon, you might be able to catch her."
"Damn, we're stuck in traffic at Fifty‑ninth Street. There was a fender bender on Lex. But I'll get there as soon as I can."
"Okay, maybe get your driver to try Fifth."
"Good idea."
She clicked off and stared at the road. The George Washington Bridge was just ahead. If she broke the speed limit once she hit the West Side Highway, and caught the lights right, she might even beat Stone there.
Wednesday, April 8
12:34 p.m.
"W.B., we've got a problem," Karl Van de Vliet said into the microphone. He was in his private office, on the scrambled videophone. "Kristen's mother showed up just before noon with a pistol, demanding to know where she was. When I tried to take the gun away from her, she accidentally shot herself through the side. Fortunately, it was only a flesh wound, but it took us almost an hour to stabilize her."
"Christ! Even Kristy thinks she’s crazy. Why did she—?"
"Kristen smuggled her a letter somehow. And she came looking for her." He thought about how they shouldn't be having this conversation on any kind of phone, even one that was supposedly scrambled. But there was no choice. "It gets worse. I just called Eight‑Eighty Park and they checked her room and Kristen's not there. She was there when Roxanne brought up her breakfast at nine, but nobody's seen her since. They assumed she'd gone back to sleep. Nobody there has any idea where she went."
"Shit. What am I paying them for? The staff is there for the sole purpose of making sure something like this didn't happen."
"Well, W.B., that's your part of the show. I'm just trying to practice medicine. In any case, she slipped out somehow. So the thing now is, where did she go?"
"Well, she didn't come here. Or at least she hasn't yet. Depending on how much she can still remember, she might have gone to her old place down in the Village. Maybe she still has a homing instinct. That's probably the first location we ought to check. Jesus, if she gets recognized and starts acting crazy and then Cambridge Pharmaceuticals finds out—"
"W.B., the bigger problem now could be her mother, Katherine. You know her. She's unbalanced but she also still remembers how it all started. She was actually here a couple of times. If she sees Kristen, then God help us."
"Karl, I've got everything—and I do mean everything— riding on this. What happened with that Hampton woman? You've got to get started with her. Is she on board yet or what?"
"She was here this morning, but she got temporarily spooked by the gun and the craziness. She'll be back, though."
"When?"
"I took care of it, trust me," Van de Vliet declared. "In the meantime, I'll try to maintain Kristen's mother under sedation as long as possible. But we can't keep her out of touch forever. That would be flirting with kidnapping."
"I'll send Ken over to West Eleventh Street to check out her place," Bartlett said. "If she's there, he'll get her."
And he signed off, the image on the computer going dark.
Van de Vliet felt a wave of apprehension. Every day it got worse. Would any of the other patients develop the Syndrome? Or was its development unique to the Beta?
Kristen had agreed of her own free will to undergo the Beta, and she'd been warned that any experimental procedure involved significant risk. She'd signed release documents absolving Gerex of any liability. But when treatments go awry, patients tend not to recall the releases they signed. Undoubtedly, she'd now conveniently forgotten that fact. Assuming she still remembered anything.
Time to go back to the OR and see how Katherine was doing. If she seemed completely stabilized and coherent, she could be moved down to the intensive‑care area in the floor below, the subbasement. That way absolutely nobody could get to her. He clicked off the computer and walked back to the OR.
"Karl, she's awake," David said as he walked in. He'd been monitoring her. "It's probably okay to move her."
Thank God, Van de Vliet thought. Maybe there's some way to reason with her rationally. He moved over and looked down. Her hair was soaked with sweat and she looked very, very tired.
"Mrs. Starr, can you understand me? I'm Dr. Van de Vliet. I need to talk to you about your daughter, Kristen."
"Who . . . who are you?" she mumbled, her eyes trying to focus.
"I'm Kristen's physician. She came to see me some months back. Do you recall? About her . . . skin problem. I seem to remember you came here with her at one point."
She stared at him mutely for a moment, then closed her eyes and nodded.
"At that time, Mrs. Starr, we discussed some radical treatment options. Things that hadn't been tried before. Do you have any recollection of that?"
She opened her eyes again and stared at him, trying to focus.
"You said she'd be all right," she mumbled, slurring the words. "Then your receptionist told me she'd gone to New Mexico. But I got a letter—"
"That story was to protect her professionally," he lied. "She was afraid the press might find out she was here and start speculating about her health. But now she's in the post‑procedure phase of treatment. It may be a while longer before she's able to return to the normal life she's used to."
"She's okay, isn't she?" came a plaintive, slurred mumble. "In her letter it sounded like she’d lost her memory or something. She didn't sound right."
It was a question that cut him to the core.
"Mrs. Starr, I think we should focus on you right now. You've had a traumatic episode and you've injured yourself pretty seriously. You may have to stay here at the institute for a few days so we can take care of you." He took her hand which felt deathly cold. "Tell me, is there anyone we should notify of your whereabouts so they won't be alarmed?"
"There's an address book in my purse." Her eyelids flickered. "Those are all people I'm close to. I just want to sleep. I can't think now."
Good, he thought, the sedative is finally kicking in.
"All right. You need your rest. We'll talk about this later." He turned and picked up the purse at the foot of the bed. But when he searched inside, he didn't see an address book.
Where was it? he wondered.
Alexa Hampton had started reading Kristen's letter, which probably was part of the reason she got uneasy. Did she make off with the address book? But why?
It didn't matter. She would be back.
If Debra had done what she was supposed to do.
"David have Mrs. Starr taken downstairs. I need to see Deb."
"You've got it."
Van de Vliet went down the hall and then through the heavy steel air lock and into the laboratory.
"Deb, can I have a word with you?" He motioned for her to follow him to the computer cubicle in the back, past the head‑high racks of solvent vials and the giant autoclave.
"Is she going to be okay?" Debra asked.
"I think so. It's in her interest that we keep her here and away from a hospital. Gunshot wounds raise a lot of questions. I seriously doubt that that pistol was licensed in her name, given how little she seemed to know about its operation." He settled into a chair and began stroking his brow. "Did you manage to take care of that matter with Alexa Hampton?"
She nodded. "You know, she's not yet entirely with the program."
"Yes, but she will be. Putting her mother in the clinical trials was probably crucial." He grimaced. "God, what a nightmare. A medical experiment that got away from us has turned into guns and virtual kidnapping and God knows what manner of felonies. If this thing gets completely off the track, we could all go to prison. But the real tragedy is that all the successful research we've done here will be buried in infamy."
"It's not going to turn out that way. The results here have been so spectacular." She was gazing at him with eyes that seemed too worshipful. More and more, she made him self‑conscious. She needed a father, but he did not need a daughter. He still lived on the memory of Camille.
"This has all got to be resolved soon, Deb. There's a reporter who found out that we had to drop a patient from the program—which would be Kristen—and W.B. thinks he's a little too close for comfort. Now Kristen's mother shows up. It's all starting to unravel."
"Don't worry," she said, getting up. "This Hampton woman is going to be back today. So I've got to get started on her blood."
Wednesday, April 8
2:41 p.m.
Ally was very fond of Kristen's West Village neighborhood, since she herself had once had an apartment on West Eleventh Street, just west of Seventh Avenue. The street was tree‑lined and many of its nineteenth‑century town houses were home to single families, though sometimes the ground floor, with the entry "under the stoop," i.e., beneath the stairs, was rented out to provide a little side income. She had rented one of those "garden apartments"—the upstairs owners were two gay bankers—and had loved it. However, it also was entirely possible that Kristen had the whole town house to herself—that was the kind of thing that a lot of celebrities who lived, or even just spent time, in New York did. There was privacy and there also was the sense of living in an actual house instead of in some cookie‑cutter apartment. Then again she could have a downstairs neighbor.
A solitary town house seemed somewhat at odds with the extroverted personality Kristen displayed on TV, but the privacy was probably intended more for her sugar daddy, Winston Bartlett, than for her.
Ally had been pushing the pace ever since she got off the phone with Stone. At Twenty‑third Street she had peeled off the West Side Highway and gone over to Seventh Avenue, where she had a straight shot downtown. She passed St Vincent's Hospital, and the notorious six‑way intersection that caused so many accidents, and hung a right on West Eleventh.
She was approaching the corner at Bleecker Street when a huge black Lincoln Navigator lumbered in front of her, at an angle that cut her off and blocked the street. Then the vehicle abruptly slammed to a halt.
"What—!"
She hit her own brakes and managed to slide to a stop just before she collided with the Lincoln's rear bumper. At first she thought they'd deliberately cut her off, but then she realized the move had nothing to do with her. A man and a woman were piling out. He was muscular and balding, with dark hair and sunglasses, and he was dressed in black. She had red hair streaked with white and was dressed in a nurse's whites. They were in a major hurry.
That was when she recognized the man she'd met at Gramercy Park, the Japanese sidekick Bartlett had called Ken.
Oh shit.
Then she realized that a thirtyish woman was running down West Eleventh Street toward them, carrying a dark green backpack in her left hand. They were gesturing for her to come to them and get into the vehicle, though she didn't appear to see them yet. Halfway down the block behind her, a man in a tan flight jacket was running, calling out.
"Kristen, wait I just want to talk—"
The running woman glanced over her shoulder at him and, at that moment collided with Bartlett's flunky. As she recoiled from the impact the red‑haired woman seized her left arm.
"Kirby, come," the woman said. "You're not well. We'll take you back."
"No!" she yelled, and twisted free of the woman's grasp. But now the Japanese guy had grabbed her other arm.
"It's going to be all right," he said as he caught the top of her head and started shoving her through the open door of the Navigator. "You shouldn't go out alone."
At that moment the man in the tan flight jacket reached the scene. It was Stone, but he'd been moments too late.
He stretched his arm into the Lincoln and tried to take the girl's hand. "Kristen, don't go with them. I just need to talk—"
"You don't need to do anything, pal," the man called Ken declared. "Except get out of the way."
He chopped the side of Stone's neck with an open hand, sending him sprawling backwards onto the pavement, flight jacket askew.
Now something odd was going on. Another girl was running down the sidewalk. "Kristy, wait. Don't . . ."
But the redheaded woman had already gotten into the backseat of the SUV, beside the girl, and the Japanese man was heading around the front. Three seconds later, he was behind the wheel and peeling out. They were gone.
Ally sat watching, stunned. But now a Chevy sedan was departing a parking space three cars down from where she was and she quickly pulled in.
By then Stone Aimes had picked himself up off the sidewalk and was gazing wistfully in the direction of the vanishing Lincoln. The girl who'd been behind him stopped and was talking to him.
Ally quickly locked the Toyota and went over.
"But why did she run?" Stone Aimes was asking. He was disheveled but then being slugged and knocked to the sidewalk takes a toll on anybody's poise.
"She didn't know who you were," the girl replied She looked like she would have been more at home in the East Village than here: late twenties, tattoo on one bicep, eyebrows pierced blue jeans, hair needing a better day. She had serious acne scars on her cheeks. "I think she thought you were them, whoever they were."
Ally looked Stone over and felt a surge of admiration. In spite of the fact he just got decked, there was an athletic feeling about the way he carried his body, as though he was ready to pounce on a news source. Only he just didn't pounce quite fast enough this time.
She walked up and gave him a hug. For a lot of reasons.
"Hey, we can't go on meeting like this."
"My God, how humiliating." He winced.
"What in heaven's name just happened? That was Kristen, all right. But why was she running from you?"
"I saw this woman walking very fast up the street carrying a backpack and I just took a shot and called out 'Kristen.' She glanced back at me, then took off like a rabbit. All I accomplished was to drive her directly into the grasp of those goons."
"You scared her," the girl with the pierced eyebrows shouted, gazing angrily at Stone. "Who are you? Why did you—?"
"I'm a newspaper reporter," he said. "Who are you?"
"I sublet the garden apartment from her. I met her when I was doing her makeup at the E! channel. I mentioned I was looking for a place and she said she liked me and wanted somebody she liked to be her subtenant. The rent is really low. Then they canceled her show and she had a mental meltdown and went to a spa somewhere to regroup. Or at least that's what everybody at E! says."
"So that's definitely Kristen Starr?" Ally asked.
"I hadn't seen her in over five months, not even to pay the rent, and I couldn't believe it was her when she rang my bell and asked if she could borrow my copy of her key. At first I almost didn't recognize her. She looked . . . different somehow. The odd part was, I got the impression that she didn't recognize me either, at least for a minute or two. When I asked her if she wanted the rent, she just looked at me funny. A few minutes later, she brought the key back and she had a half‑open backpack stuffed with clothes and papers. She seemed nervous and disoriented. I was going to try and help her get a cab. But then you showed up."
"Hey, look, I had no idea I was going to freak her out like that," Stone said.
"What's your name?" Ally asked and then she introduced herself.
"My named is Cindy Dobbs. And you know something? Kristen didn't seem like the same person, in a lot of ways. She looked really different. I don't know how to explain it. But something was really, really wrong with her. And she kept saying her name wasn't Kristen, that it's something else—I can't remember what now. All I know is, she was totally spooked."
"Talk about bad timing," Stone said.
"She was so paranoid she kept babbling about how 'they' knew she was here in her apartment and were coming to get her and she had to get away real quick. I don't know who she was talking about. Some guy used to come by and his white stretch limo would be double‑parked for a couple of hours while he went in. But other than him, nobody ever came here."
"Cindy, the truth is, I was talking to her this very morning on the phone," Ally said. "I'm the one who called her. I also met her mother today, who just got a crazy letter from her and was walking around with a pistol because of it. I'm getting to be deeply invested in Kristen Starr. Something bizarre seems to have happened to her and I need to find out what it is."
Ally didn't want to confess that she felt indirectly responsible for what had just occurred If she hadn't phoned . . . She stood thinking a minute, then, "Did you say you had a key to her place?"
Cindy shrugged. "I've had it since I moved in. We had copies of each other's keys. Just in case, you know." She reached into her ragged jeans and pulled it out and stared at it. It was attached to a blue plastic tab, Greenwich locksmiths.
"Then could we borrow it long enough to go in and take a look around? Maybe we could find some clue to what's going on."
"Hey, if you want the key, and you think it can help you find her, you can just have it." She was holding it out. "I don't want to go in there, ever. With my luck, those people would show up again and take me away. But let me know if you find out anything, okay? I really thought of her as a friend, even though we actually didn't know each other that well. She didn't ever introduce me to that older guy who came around. Probably because he was married, at least that's my guess."
"I think she knows those people who grabbed her just now," Ally said, taking the key. "Cindy, can we exchange phone numbers?"
"Sure. I meant it about letting me know if you find out what's going on with her. Everybody at work is going to be really bummed when they hear about this."
Moments later, Ally and Stone were alone on the street, with Stone still appearing dazed. Now, taking measure of him in the daylight, she noticed a bit more of the mileage in his face and body. Still, it was good mileage and it had left him seasoned and lean. Also, she sensed that he really cared about things. This was more like the man she remembered, a mensch in wolf's clothing.
"Are you sure you're okay?" she asked.
"I'm going to be fine," he said. "Jesus, I never dreamed I'd spook her the way I did. By the way, did you get the license number of that Lincoln? I sure as hell didn't."
"I didn't need it. That guy is Winston Bartlett's personal bodyguard. He called him Ken. I was at Bartlett's place on Gramercy Park a couple of days ago and I saw him there."
"You're not kidding, are you?"
"I wish." She paused. "You know, Kristen and Bartlett were being talked about as an item back when. 'Page Six.' "
"The Sentinel would never touch it, but that was more than a rumor. Over the years I've had occasion to take more than a passing interest in his affairs." He grinned. "And for the past several days, he's been taking a lot more interest in my affairs, ever since he found out about the book."
"Incidentally," she declared, "I didn't have a chance to tell you on the phone, but Kristen seems to have no memory of who she is. Somebody told her that her name is Kirby, and that's what she insists on being called. All in all, she sounded deeply screwed up." She dangled the key. "So why don't we go up and see if we can learn anything?"
"Did it seem odd to you that, what's her name, Cindy didn't want to go in with us," he mused as they headed up the steps.
"Well, maybe she's already seen it. God only knows what we're going to find. Though the place she had in Chelsea was pretty well maintained. After I redid it, it was a knockout, of course, but she'd already moved down here by then."
The building dated from the middle of the nineteenth century and the entryway, painted white, was a slight nod to the fashion for the Greek Revival style that made its way into the New York town houses of that period.
She shoved the key into the new lock, a Medico, and pushed open the door. Stone moved past her and switched on the light.
What awaited them was a minimally furnished but elegant living room, with a small couch and table. The downstairs "parlor floor" had been "opened up"; a lot of walls had been taken out and a staircase was on one side of the front room. It felt like a modern loft.
Memorabilia from E! was all over, the logo on throw pillows and two empty mugs on the table. The main decoration, however, consisted of publicity photos of Kristen around the walls, a smiling blonde with flowing tresses down over her shoulders. In all of them she was wearing heavy makeup and the photos appeared to have been airbrushed.
They were both trying to absorb what they were actually seeing. Each photo, and there were at least sixteen, was pinned to the walls with a steak knife, all with matching white bone handles.
"Jesus, who do you think did this?" Stone asked. "Could it be that ditzy girl downstairs?"
"I'd say she did it herself. Supposedly the reason she went to the Dorian Institute was because she was having some kind of personal crisis over starting to look older. She was consumed with terminal self‑hate. That's what this has to be about."
"I've never caught her on TV," Stone said, walking over to study one of the photos, "but from what little I saw of her on the street just now, she sure seemed different from these head shots."
"Well, this is exactly how she looked on the tube." She told him the alleged story of how Kristen had ended up at the Dorian Institute. Then she gazed around the room, still having trouble taking it in. "Jesus, this is really sick."
"Ally, I'm absolutely convinced that whatever happened or didn't happen—keep that possibility in mind—to Kristen is connected somehow to the reason Gerex's clinical trials have been put under ironclad security."
"Which is why, no matter what, they've got to get her back on the reservation." Ally thought a moment. "Van de Vliet told me she'd left the clinic of her own accord. Which clearly was BS. Winston Bartlett has her stashed somewhere. Probably in an apartment in one of the buildings he owns." She looked over. "What do you think it all means?"
"How's this for a guess? Kristen is experiencing some kind of side effect that's truly horrendous. Losing your memory is bad enough, but there's probably something more too. I can't imagine what it is, but if the truth about it ever gets out, their entire program of stem cell research would be jeopardized."
"Well, I don't see much here to help us find her," she declared, looking around. "The knives in the walls don't speak well for her grip on sanity. Who knows? Maybe nothing's physically wrong with her. Maybe it's just all in her crazy head. Look at this place, for goodness' sake. Except for the knives, it looks pretty normal. Maybe she's just a nutcase and imagining that her memory is going."
As she gazed around the room one last time, she noticed an answering machine on the floor next to the couch. The message light on it was blinking, and she walked over and pushed the play button. She remembered that Stone had said he hadn't left a message, and Kristen had picked up when she called her, short‑circuiting the voice mail.
The phone machine announced in an electronic voice, "You have one message, at two‑eleven p.m."
Then an unctuous male voice came on. "Kirby, we know you're there. You're still in treatment. You shouldn't be wandering around unsupervised. It's a lot better, a lot safer, for you to stay with us now. This is Ken. I'm coming with Delores to pick you up. I know you're upset, but you shouldn't be. We're going to take care of you and help you."
Then the phone machine clicked off.
"My God" Stone said glancing at his watch, "that's almost exactly when I got here. That's why she thought I was with them."
"That's the guy who slugged you. I recognize his voice. Guess they suspected she was here and that phone call was intended to flush her out. It worked."
"And I ended up right in the middle of it. Damn."
She walked around the empty room, checking it out. Except for the head shots stabbed to the wall, there was not a scrap of paper to be seen.
So how do we find Kristen without a clue? she wondered. Should the kidnapping, if that's what it was, be reported to the police? But what proof do we have that any of it actually happened? They're not going to third‑degree Winston Bartlett.
"You know," Stone said staring closely at one of the photos, "I didn't actually get a really good look at the woman running down the street. She glanced back at me when I called out her name, but the truth is, I'm not a hundred percent sure this is her."
"Come on," Ally said "that had to be Kristen. The girl downstairs recognized her. Though she did say she looked different somehow."
"You're going to think I'm crazy," he went on, still staring around at the walls, "but it seems to me the girl on the street was a lot younger than this one." He bit a fingernail contemplatively. "Christ, this is some sick material."
"Stone, I'm going down to my office, to take care of some things and think about this. Come along if you like. Maybe we've overlooked something obvious. Something that—"
That was when the beeper on his belt went off. He looked down at the number.
"Whoops. It's my managing editor."
"Where you work?"
"Right. Only I've got a feeling this call could be about how I used to work there."
Wednesday, April 8
3:18 p.m.
Ellen O'Hara, R.N., who was in charge of the nursing staff at the Dorian Institute and chair of the union committee for the Gerex Corporation, looked around the room, which was a conference space just off the laboratory in the first level of the basement. Each of the three other nurses present reported directly to her and they had filed in casually one by one, in order not to draw the attention of the research staff as they passed the laboratory. They all sensed the imminence of crisis and this was a clandestine emergency meeting.
The appearance of Katherine Starr and the shooting that transpired had left the entire nursing staff in dismay. Of course they all remembered Kristen Starr, the outgoing and scatterbrained TV personality, who had arrived in the throes of a mental meltdown. Some also remembered her mother, Katherine, who had made a nuisance of herself till she was refused further admittance (on the orders, everyone suspected of the owner, Winston Bartlett, who was widely reported to have a romantic relationship with the girl).
They also suspected that something had started going terribly wrong with Kristen's cosmetic procedure. After seeming okay, her behavior had suddenly become erratic and she had been immediately whisked into intensive care in the subbasement and quarantined before anybody on the regular nursing staff could learn what the problem was. She was attended by the research team he had brought from California, and the information officer at the registration desk in the lobby, May Gooden, was instructed to say she had voluntarily left the program. (Well, maybe she had, but she hadn't left the institute.) Then less than a week ago, she was rolled out on a gurney and loaded into the ambulance, which was driven by Winston Bartlett's Japanese thug, and taken God knows where.
Ellen had checked and was dismayed, though not entirely surprised, to discover that none of this had been included in the weekly clinical‑trial reports being forwarded to the National Institutes of Health. (Which in itself was a flagrant violation of procedural requirements.)
And now this. Kristen's own mother showed up deranged and carrying a pistol, looking for her. How much longer would it be before the NIH, or the police, found out that something funny had gone on?
Right now the first thing to do was to get the three senior nurses in the room to put a lid on the rumors. They were her lieutenants; it was their job.
Elise Baker, single and sharp and acerbic, was in charge of the second floor; Mary Hinds, a kindly mother of two, had responsibility for the third floor, and May Gooden, the queen of communication skills, handled the reception and oversaw the staff responsible for the dining room. All three were in their forties and they reported to Ellen O'Hara, who reported to Karl Van de Vliet.
"Elise, could you please close the door."
"Sure." She was getting up. "Is this the quorum? You don't want anybody else here?"
"We have to decide what to do about Katherine Starr," Ellen began. "In my opinion, the absolute first thing we have to do is make sure the story of what just happened never leaves this building."
"Well, I think Dr. Vee should call the police and have her arrested" Elise said as she quietly shut the door. "The very idea. Barging in here with a loaded gun."
"I don't feel safe in the lobby anymore," May Gooden declared. Her face was lined and she had streaks of premature gray. "We're all exposed out here in the middle of nowhere. I think Charles should have a pistol. What good is it having a 'security guard' if you're still not secure."
"Mary, what do you think?" Ellen asked. She knew Mary would always try to split the difference and reconcile differing opinions.
"I don't know. Maybe it was just the case of one crazy person. It's probably not going to happen again."
Okay, Ellen thought, that's three different votes. Call the cops, beef up security, or put our collective heads in the sand.
She worried about the others, but she was also worried about her own situation. Her husband Harold left her eight years ago for a younger woman, and after reclaiming her maiden name, she'd raised their two young sons on her own. Now the oldest, Eric, was ready to start college and she had no idea how she was going to pay for it if she lost this job.
The Gerex Corporation paid her almost twice what she would be earning as an R.N. at an ordinary hospital. With her current salary, she had a shot at providing the boys with an education. Without it—if Gerex got embroiled in some horrible scandal and was put out of business—she had no hope whatsoever.
Even worse, she might be named as being complicit in some unethical shenanigans, knowingly putting a patient at risk in a human trial. That would certainly drive a stake into the heart of her nursing career.
"Elise, we'd better think long and hard about bringing in the police. They would talk to Katherine and she'd tell them Kristen was missing and we simply have no idea where it would end." She paused. "I'm about to say something I shouldn't, but I guess this is the moment. You all deserve to know an important fact. The NIH has not been told the reason Kristen Starr was terminated from the stem cell program."
"How do you know that?" Elise asked.
"I just checked the reporting records. Call it a hunch. We all know that, for a formal clinical trial, that's a flagrant violation of NIH rules."
"What are you saying?" Mary asked, her voice filling with alarm.
"I'm saying we have no choice but to keep this whole matter of Kristen and her mother under cover. If the Dorian Institute gets caught tampering with the data from a clinical trial, it could be the end of everybody's career. Dr. Van de Vliet's certainly, but most probably ours as well."
"My God," Elise blurted out "Did we have to wait till some crazy person with a gun barged in here before you got around to telling us that clinical‑trial data had been fiddled with?"
"Maybe Dr. Vee still intends to provide a full report to the NIH. Whatever he intends, if this whole matter blows up, the less any of us knows about what may have gone on, the better."
"Well," Elise declared, "I think they all should be confronted. The clinical trials aren't over yet. There'll be a final report so he can still give the NIH whatever data had been left out. We should confront him and demand that he give a full accounting in the final report Otherwise we all could end up being part of some conspiracy."
"Maybe we ought to think this over for a few days before we do anything drastic," Mary said. "We don't know what he intends to do and there's still time. If we start giving Dr. Vee ultimatums, it's just going to upset him even more. He could have been killed taking the gun away from her. He's got enough to worry about just now. Maybe he's going to handle her special case some other way that we don't know about."
"My concern right now," Ellen said, "is the people who work under us. I don't think pulling an ostrich number is going to protect anybody. We've got to get out of denial and face up to how serious this might get. And I'll tell you our number one priority right now. If Katherine Starr walks out of here before the Kristen problem is cleared up and gets the ear of someone in the media, then everybody who works here . . . Let's just say we mustn't allow that to happen. That's why we're having this meeting."
"Are you suggesting we should keep her . . . sedated?" Mary asked. "All her medications have to be approved by—"
"No sedative should be listed on her chart and I'm not telling you what to do, but use your imagination."
There was a moment of silence as the implications of the unspoken order settled in.
"And starting immediately, we need to hold a meeting of the staff on each floor and impress on them that the story of Katherine Starr must never leave this building. Ever. Remind everybody that that would be a serious violation of a staffer's original security agreement and would subject them to legal action the likes of which they can't even begin to imagine. And if somebody comes around asking questions about Kristen Starr, nobody here knows anything. We can say she was here because that's part of the record and she is no longer here. End of statement. Beyond that, nobody knows zip."
This problem is far from over, Ellen told herself. God only knows how it's going to end.
Wednesday, April 8
3:22 p.m.
As Stone Aimes stepped off the elevator on the sixth floor, his mind was running through his options. This phone call had to be about Winston Bartlett. He was going to step up the pressure. First there was the hellfire meeting in Jane's office, and now he'd seen a kidnapping. Maybe this was about that. Was Jane going to pass along a threat of legal action if that crime got reported?
The managing editor, Jay, had left a message with the third‑floor receptionist, Rhonda, to be forwarded to Stone. Gist: he was urgently required in the office of their corporate counsel.
What does this tell me? he wondered. That they're going to try to do something to me that could have legal ramifications?
No, more likely it means that I'm going to be given an ultimatum, maybe an injunction. And Jane gets to deliver it with all the legal trimmings.
Still, he was determined to go on. "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you jive." Right? Well, not necessarily. But at the least, the truth could make a hell of a book. And with that came financial freedom, at least for a while. . . .
The hallway felt desolate and ominous as he walked through the doorway that opened onto the cubicles. Jane Tully was down on the third floor, but he wanted to stop by his desk first and see if there’d been any further communications from Winston Bartlett. Possibly there still could be a deal in the making
The room itself was silent, no one meeting his eye. Maybe, he thought, it's the middle of the afternoon and everybody's dozing off from a late lunch. But when he got to his cubicle, he realized why he had suddenly become invisible. The top of his desk was bare, and there were three large cardboard boxes sitting on the gray carpet next to it.
"I think I get the picture," he said to the empty space.
It looked like Winston Bartlett had just provided him with a career decision. For a moment he felt his life passing before his eyes, but then all he could think about was the future. This was not just the end of a wage‑slave era; it was the beginning of the next phase of his life.
He saw everyone still avoiding his eyes as he turned around and walked back to the elevator. How much did Jane know about this? She had to know everything, which was why Jay sent him to see her. She would have no qualms about giving someone the ax, including a former lover.
When he stepped off the elevator on the third floor, Rhonda looked at him as though he were a corpse.
"She's—"
"I know she's here. Don't bother buzzing her."
He strode purposefully down the hallway, realizing it was probably the last time he'd ever walk it, and pushed open Jane's door. She was on the phone and looked up startled putting her hand over the mouthpiece.
"What—"
"Just came to say farewell. Jay told me to come see you. I
guess he was sure you'd want to be part of this important life moment."
"Stone, for God's sake"—she turned back to the phone—"let me . . . I'll call you tomorrow." She slammed down the receiver. "You have to know I had nothing to do with this. Bartlett got to the Family. I think it was one of those noblesse oblige kind of things. Old Money meets New Money and needs to placate it. The Sentinel is only marginally a profit‑making enterprise and the last thing they need is a lot of shit from their landlord. He wanted you gone. And since your job was a small price for them to pay to ensure domestic tranquility, do the math. Sorry, but that's how it had to be. For God's sake, Stone, why did you drive him to this?"
The ironic thing was, she was managing to look vaguely contrite—tugging at a lock of short hair. He wasn't sure how she had the brass. Apologies from the executioner are traditionally a tough sell.
"Let me tell you something, Jane. I already know more about Winston Bartlett than he wants. He had somebody kidnapped today before my very eyes. I even got slugged trying to stop it. So you can tell his lawyers to tell him he'd better back off. The people who did it were recognized and they work for him. If he wants to play tough, I could have a heartfelt exchange with somebody I know very well at the Sixth Precinct, and also with the tabloids, where I know a shitload of hungry columnists. Winston Bartlett could get real famous, real fast"
"Stone, you brought this on yourself. I tried to warn you, but you're hell‑bent on your own destruction. You're your own worst enemy." She picked up her Blackberry and switched it off and sighed. "You never listened to me before and I don't expect you to do it now, but take some free advice anyway: try not to piss off important people. It is frequently a negative career move."
"Jane, you know John Kennedy once said, 'Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,' and I think that moment for me, is
now. From here on, I'm going to be doing what I need to do, not what Bartlett or Jay or whoever tells me to do. I guess that includes you too. There comes a time when I have to do what's in my heart."
She was finally focusing, looking at him strangely. "Stone, what did you just say? Bartlett had somebody kidnapped? Today? What on earth are you talking about?"
"Did I secure your vagrant attention? Good. Actually, it was less than an hour ago. There's no point in going into details, but I'm pretty sure she was the patient terminated from the clinical trials at the Dorian Institute that I had you ask Bartlett's lawyers about. I think there's the possibility that something really weird began happening to her out there in New Jersey. But I didn't get a chance to talk to her because they grabbed her and took off."
"Well, what do you think happened to her out there?"
"The only thing I've heard and that's secondhand is that she lost some part of her memory. She's even having trouble remembering her name."
"How do you know all this?" she asked staring at him. "Were you—?"
"I . . . know somebody who talked with her this morning. Just a few short exchanges on the phone. That's all I can tell you. They're doing something very powerful there at the institute, but in her case it seems to have gone horribly wrong. That's my best guess. So they dropped her from the clinical trials and gave her a new identity and stashed her someplace incommunicado. But she got away for a couple of hours, somehow, and managed to go back to her old apartment. In her case, it's a Village town house. But Bartlett nabbed her back."
"If you really believe all that, Stone, shouldn't you be worried for your own safety?" It was clear she was finally taking him seriously.
"Bartlett got me fired. That's probably enough for now. I don't know enough to be a threat to him. Yet."
"But what if you find out . . . whatever it is you're looking for? Then—"
"Then I'll know if medical miracles sometimes come with a strange price."
She was looking at him, pity entering her dark eyes. "What are you going to do for money? The child support you send to Amy?" She hesitated. "I'm so sorry about this, Stone. If you need a little help for the short term, I could—"
"Don't go there. I can take cash out on a couple of credit cards. And when I turn in the manuscript for the book, I'll get the other two‑thirds of the advance. After that, I'm hoping I might get an actual career."
"Oh, Stone, I'm really sorry about this," she said with feeling. "Truly I am. I. . . I guess I still enjoy seeing you. Having you around. You're a mensch, you know that? Whatever your other failings, and God knows they're plenty, you were always kind. You're even kind to people who don't necessarily wish you well."
"Well, tell that to Amy if you ever get the chance. Sometimes she thinks her dad is the meanest guy alive. Particularly when I don't honor her every whim."
"You're a good father too." She sighed.
For Stone, this was always the moment that he wanted her back—when she let her guard down.
"Dammit, Stone, why couldn't we make a go of it?"
"We stopped having fun, Jane. That's all that happened. I started to bore you. Back then I didn't provide enough excitement, enough Sturm und Drang in your life."
"You weren't dull, Stone, but sometimes you could be maddeningly smug."
"That may be about to change. Now that I'm an unemployed freelancer. And I just ran into a blast from the past. Who knows what my life is about to be like?" He turned to leave. "By the way, give my best to Jay. Hopefully, he'll be the last managing editor I'll ever have to suck up to."
“Take care, Stone." She was getting up. "You can fight
this, you know. They had me write up some kind of bullshit breach‑of‑contract brief, in case you wouldn't go quietly. But it's full of holes. I know, since I deliberately wrote it that way."
"Hey, thanks anyway. It's not worth it. I'm not going to fight to keep a job I never liked all that much in the first place. Every time I wanted to do some serious journalism—like that piece about using the Internet to store everybody's medical records—Jay always found a reason not to run it. I've only got so much dignity to lose."
He turned and strode out of the office, deciding to forego any more farewells. Besides, he had better things to do. Get somebody from the mailroom to carry the boxes—the shards of his erstwhile, so‑called career—to the lobby, where he could get a cab. Take the files home, stash them, and then get going.
Wednesday, April 8
4:40 p.m.
"Hi," he said, walking through the door of Ally's downtown studio, CitiSpace. Jennifer had the desk at the front and she served as a makeshift receptionist. She looked up as he continued, "I don't have an appointment, but I'd love to see Ally Hampton. Any chance?"
"And you're . . . ?"
Just as he started to tell her, Ally emerged from her office/cubicle in the back and spotted him.
"Stone! What—"
"Bet you didn't think you'd see me again quite so soon."
She felt her pulse jump. No, she hadn't. She'd told him she was going down to the office, but she'd certainly had no idea (or hope) he'd just show up a couple of hours later.
Since she got back to the office she'd been in a struggle with her conscience over what to do about Kristen. Was there any good to be served by bringing in the police? At the time it had seemed pointless and it still felt that way. The whole matter was awfully anecdotal.
Worse, she didn't really feel she should talk it over with
Jennifer, which she would have loved to do. They supported each other in a lot of things, but this crazy story would just freak her out. Why do that?
The more troubling thing was, she’d started feeling tired and slightly dizzy. Now she was just hoping to stay focused long enough to last out the day. What, she wondered was happening to her? It wasn't like a chest‑tightening spell of angina—which, thankfully, she hadn't had for a couple of days now. No, this just felt like something was sapping her energy. She couldn't help the suspicion that this queasy condition was somehow related to her encounter with Dr. Van de Vliet's testy blond colleague Debra. While she was supposedly taking that blood sample, was she also doing something else?
"Welcome to my home away from home. You're right, I didn't expect—"
"CitiSpace," he interjected seeming to try out the word as he looked around She noticed that Jennifer and the others automatically assumed he was a new client of hers and were trying to look preoccupied. Jen, however, was giving him a furtive appraisal, running the numbers. He was a decent looker, actually kind of cute, and he seemed pleasant and outgoing. Not a bad start. That was what she would say the moment he was out of earshot.
"You like the name?"
"Not bad. Sort of a takeoff on Citibank?"
"My dad came up with it back before they copyrighted that name. Maybe they stole the idea from us." She was feeling cheered by the sight of him. Yes, it was good to have him back for a while, maybe longer. "But come on, let me introduce you around"
Which she did. Jennifer gave her a telepathic glance that said This guy looks like he might be worth the effort. What's the deal?
Then they went to Ally's office, a high‑walled cubicle in the back with a computer and a drafting table. She had a CAD program running.
"Sorry to just invite myself down like this," he said, "but I got off work early. Matter of fact, I just became a freelancer. My office now consists of three cardboard boxes in my walk‑up apartment."
"What do you mean? That phone page? Did—"
"Winston Bartlett owns the building where the Sentinel's offices are. Seems he convinced the management that it would be in their interest if I were no longer employed there. I gather he thinks I know more than I actually do about what's going on out at the Dorian Institute, and I guess he thought getting me fired would slow me down. What it has done, however, is to give me even more incentive to surpass his most paranoid assumptions. Now I'm going to take him on full‑time. I want to know everything."
"Oh, Stone, I'm so sorry." She wasn't buying his bravado. He didn't look like a guy who could last very long without a paycheck.
"I have to say he gave me fair warning. That meeting where he yelled at me. This little turn of the screw is not a total shock."
"But that whole thing with Kristen . . . I'll bet that's what sent him over the edge. I shouldn't have gotten you involved in that."
"This had nothing to do with you, believe me." He shrugged "Besides, it gives me even more motivation to finish the book fast. And I'm also looking forward to spending some of my newfound quality time with you again, if you'll let me. In your favor, you've actually been inside the Dorian Institute, which is more than I can say."
She wasn't a big believer in the magic of a second time around—that would have to await further evidence—but having Stone back in her life was definitely helping on the psychological‑support front.
"I'm thinking," he went on, "that maybe we should go back to Kristen's apartment and turn the place inside out. Do it right. We both let ourselves get distracted by the little matter of our other lives."
"Stone, I'm not sure"—she lowered her voice and sat down at her desk—"but I may be having a reaction to something one of Van de Vliet's research assistants did to me out at the institute this morning. I don't know. I'm just feeling sort of weak and... funny. I'm thinking maybe I should call out there and talk to him." She took a deep breath and seemed to be mounting her courage. "Or if he needs to see me, could you possibly drive for me? I'm not sure I'm up to it"
"Hey, I'd love a chance to get inside that place." Then his eyes grew uncertain. "But are you sure you want to go back, after what seems to have happened to Kristen? You might consider waiting till we find her and—"
"Ally, are you all right?" Jennifer was walking in, carrying a manila folder. "You look kind of queasy. Can I make you some tea or something?"
"Thanks but not now," she said. "I'm feeling weird, but maybe I should call out to the institute and see what Van de Vliet says."
"Just don't agree to do anything until we talk," Stone said.
"Don't worry," she said reaching for the phone. The number for the Dorian Institute was now newly entered on her Palm Pilot and she called it. When the receptionist answered she gave her name and asked for Dr. Van de Vliet. "I was there this morning and gave a blood sample to Dr. Debra Connolly. I don't know if there's any connection, but I'm really feeling strange right now."
"What do you mean by 'strange'?" the woman asked. "Can you describe how you feel exactly? He's in the lab downstairs."
"That's just it I'm not sure I need to actually see him. I'd just like to talk to him."
"He doesn't like to be disturbed. Unless it's something very important."
"It's important enough for me to try to call him," she declared feeling herself abruptly seething. "I'm weak and dizzy. And my stomach is not in such great shape either."
"What did you have for lunch?"
My God, she realized she hadn't actually had any. After the disaster with Kristen, she'd been in such turmoil that she hadn't even thought about food.
On the other hand, she knew what food deprivation felt like. This was something else.
"I didn't have all that much lunch, but that's not the problem. Now will you please put me through?"
"Let me see what I can do," she said. "I'll call down and ask him. He might be able to see you."
Ally listened as the line went blank.
That was when she remembered she had some smoked turkey in the office fridge. Maybe a quick sandwich was called for.
While she waited, Stone was looking around the offices, taking everything in. Carrying the phone, she walked out and followed him. What, she wondered, was the place telling him about her? The meager furniture was low‑slung and utilitarian, with lots of beige and dark brown. And there were several huge storage files for blueprints and designs. There also was a comfortable easy chair and lamp near a bookcase in the corner. On the table next to the chair were two British mysteries and a thick, recently written history of New York City.
He walked over and picked it up. It was 760 pages long.
“This your idea of reading for relaxation?" he asked, waving it at her. "I tried to get through it, but I only got up to the 1930s and then I started having a bout of acute sleeping sickness every time I picked it up."
"Hey, the history of this city is a mental hobby of mine. It's always renewing itself." She smiled. "Think about it. When developers convert industrial space to residential, we end up getting a lot of work."
Then she heard the phone crackle alive. It was Van de Vliet. "Alexa, what seems to be the problem?"
She told him.
"Then I think it's important that you come back out here as soon as you can. I can't say anything until I've seen you. This could be something that could affect your procedure."
"But what do you think—"
"I don't diagnose over the phone. I was about to go home, but I'll wait for you."
She listened as he clicked off.
"Shit."
"What did he say?" Stone asked.
"He said I've got to come out."
"Do you really want to do that?"
"I don't know. But what's the point of going to a doctor here? They wouldn't know—"
"Then at least let me drive you," Stone declared. "And I'll make damned sure they don't pull something funny."
"Ally," Jennifer said ,"you look absolutely wiped out. Before you do anything, at least let me fix you a sandwich. I think there's some turkey in the fridge."
"I was thinking about that." She glanced at Stone. "You want something?"
"Sure. I'll have whatever you're having."
"Don't be so sure. Jen can tell you I take mayo and mustard both. I know it's weird but that's the way I am."
"Then I'll give it a try. I want to get to know you all over again."
"Also, I hate to say it, but I think maybe I ought to swing by the apartment and get some things. Just in case."
She listened to her own voice and wondered, would whatever happened to Kristen happen to me too?
Maybe, she thought, what I really ought to take with me is a gun. Maybe Katherine Starr had the right idea.
Jennifer finished the sandwiches and was wrapping them. "Ally, I'll go with you to your place and pick up Knickers. She can stay with me till you know what's going on."
"Thanks, Jen. I was hoping you'd volunteer." She knew she could have dropped a hint and made it happen anyway, but this was nicer.
She then went around and had a few last words. It felt like a good‑bye and she didn't want it to. But it did.
Ten minutes later, while Stone waited in her double‑parked car, she and Jennifer took the elevator up to her Barrow Street apartment.
"Where did you find that man?" Jennifer asked as soon as they got on. "He seems nice. Interesting. He's not a client, is he? And, pardon me for noticing, no wedding ring."
"He actually found me," Ally declared, punching her floor. "It's a long story, but he was a guy I was deeply in love with for about fifteen minutes back around college. The old flame I told you about, remember? Then we started getting on each other's nerves. We're both going easy on the personal details right now, but I've got a hunch he's got nobody else percolating. Which, incidentally, goes for me too, or hadn't you noticed."
They stepped off the elevator and she unlocked the door to her apartment. Knickers exploded with delight.
"Hi, baby." She reached down and ruffled the sheepdog's ears.
"I really love her," Jennifer said as she reached down to pet her too.
Knickers began a dance of joy, then ran to search for her rubber ball behind the couch, hoping for a game of fetch with Jennifer.
"By the way, I can't tell you how I appreciate your taking her. She's going to love being at your place awhile. I'm sure she gets bored crazy being here all the time. I probably should get a puppy or something to keep her company, but then she'd be jealous. And I'm not about to get a stupid cat."
"She loves me because she knows I love her," Jennifer said. "I always play with her when you bring her into the office. At least I think she loves me. This may turn out to be the test."
Ally headed into the bedroom, opened a drawer, and took out some black sweatshirts. Those and black jeans were her favorite things to wear around the house. She slept in a T‑shirt and panties, so it wasn't hard to put together her evening ensemble. Besides, if something went wrong with the experimental stem cell procedure, it wouldn't matter a damn what she was wearing.
She threw the clothes into a blue gym bag and headed for the bathroom to fetch some toiletries. By the time she got back to the living room, Jennifer had a measuring cup and was shoveling Science Diet into a large plastic bag.
They delivered Jen and Knickers back to the office. After she gave them both a farewell hug, she came around and slipped into the Toyota's driver's seat, moving Stone across.
"I'm actually feeling better now, so I'll drive as long as I can. And by the way, I'm famished. How about that turkey sandwich?"
"Thought you'd never remember."
Five minutes later, they were headed up the West Side, with Ally at the wheel. She checked the gas and was relieved to see that she still had two‑thirds of a tank. Stone was leaning back in the seat looking at her.
"You know, it's easy for me to say, but trying the stem cell procedure on your heart is probably the right thing for you to do. Still, though, it makes me nervous. If there's a medical glitch of some kind then . . . I mean, what the hell is going on with Kristen?"
"I'm going to confront him about that," she said "I damned well want some answers before I just turn myself over to him."
After they crossed the George Washington Bridge, she began feeling slightly better. Maybe, she thought, whatever it is is going to pass. As they headed north up the tree‑shrouded highway, she decided to ask him a question that had been nagging at her mind.
"Stone, I know you hate to have these talks, but something about you doesn't quite compute for me right now. There's a kind of unnatural intensity about your pursuit of Winston Bartlett and his stem cell work. And the same goes for his reaction to you. Way back when, I never really thought I knew you, and it's still true. I mean, is this all just about a book on stem cell technology? Or is it something more?"
The question was followed by a long moment of silence as he looked away, into the forest, and appeared to wrestle with his thoughts.
"You're very intuitive, Ally," he said at last "Maybe I didn't consciously set out to write about stem cells just because I knew Bartlett's Gerex Corporation was a leader in the field. But writing about stem cells automatically meant that I'd have to get close to him at some point. So was it an unconscious choice? If it was, then I wouldn't be aware of it would I?"
"But why would you want to get close to Winston Bartlett?"
"I guess that was your original question, right?"
"Pretty much."
"There are things about my past that I never told you. I could never decide exactly how to go about it. And truthfully, right now doesn't seem exactly the right moment either. You've got enough on your mind"
"Want to give me a hint?" What could he mean? she wondered. It was clear that Stone Aimes and Winston Bartlett had some kind of holy war going on between them.
"I'll tell you someday soon. But I want us both sitting down in a safe place when I do. It's going to be hard." He looked away again. "Someday soon I've got to tell my daughter, Amy, too. Maybe telling you would be a practice drill."
"So what I'm learning is that I'm not crazy. This is about more than it's about?" She sighed. "Nobody's leveling with me. With Van de Vliet I have to worry whether he's telling me the truth every time he opens his mouth. And now you're holding out. It’s like that joke about feeling like a mushroom. Everybody keeps me in the dark and feeds me bullshit." She was slowing down, pulling into an open space by the roadside. "Stone, I'm feeling a little dizzy. Maybe it's this conversation, but I think it's time you took the wheel for a while."
"Hey, don't pass out on me now," he said, snapping into the moment. "I'm not sure I could actually find this place without your help."
"Don't worry," she said, bringing the car to a stop. "I'm all right. I'm just a little worried about my reflexes."
He got out and walked around, while she hoisted herself over into the other side.
The evening commute had begun in earnest, so there was a lot more traffic than there had been that morning. But Stone turned out to be an aggressive driver, right on the edge, as though he were racing the clock. She gave him directions and then closed her eyes, hoping to rest. But all she could think about was Stone's refusal to tell her about something that loomed very large in his life.
"Tell me if I'm bothering you and I'll shut up," he interjected after a few minutes, "but—not to change the subject—did you actually give anybody permission to stick a needle in you this morning? I mean, are you sure you understood what was going on at the time?"
She shifted and opened her eyes, looking straight ahead.
"Truthfully, I assumed I was just giving a blood sample. That's what his assistant said and I took her at her word. I hate needles and I never actually watch when I give blood. This morning I just sort of went along with what was happening. And nothing seemed particularly ominous till Katherine Starr showed up and started blasting away."
"Well," he said, "do your best to get some rest and I'll try to get you there as soon as legally possible."
She stared out the window a moment before closing her eyes again. Around them the encroaching greenery of northern New Jersey felt like an ancient forest where magical things could happen. Out here in the forest, was there a magician who had the power literally to save her life?
And what about Stone? Setting aside the troubling fact that he was harboring some mysterious connection to Winston Bartlett—and that was hard to set aside—she was feeling a sense of togetherness with him that brought back a lot of positive memories. Which was bizarre, because she knew so little about what kind of man he'd become. If people are worth their salt, they change a lot in their late twenties and early thirties. So what was he really like now? What did he love? What did he hate? What were his priorities? Did he believe in the Golden Rule?
Mulling over all this, she slowly drifted away. . . .
Dusk was approaching by the time he pulled to a stop at the gated entrance of the Dorian Institute. Along the way he'd begun getting a sense that they were being followed by a dark‑colored Lincoln Town Car, but it could have been his imagination. And he hadn't seen it for the past fifteen minutes, after he pulled onto the leafy lakeside drive leading to the institute.
"Hey, we're here, Ally. Rise and shine. How're you feeling?"
There was no response when he touched her.
Wednesday, April 8
7:20 p.m.
"Jesus, Ally, are you all right?" He leaned over and shook her.
Finally she jumped, and then her eyelids fluttered open.
"Where . . . ?" She looked around.
"The sign says this is it. The institute."
"Oh shit, Stone, I'm feeling really strange," she said after a moment of getting her bearings. "Everything around me seems like it's moving. It's as though the space I'm in has an extra dimension. I don't know . . . maybe it was totally stupid to come back out here. Maybe I should have just gone to my doctor in the city."
"Hey, you've got a seriously deficient sense of timing. We're here now. I've been breaking the speed limit for the last half hour."
"I know. Shit. I really don't know what to do. I don't trust anybody."
"Well, you could start by trusting me. I'm along to try to make sure nothing bad happens." He paused. "So what do we do?"
A brass plaque on a redbrick pillar beside the gate bore a two‑inch‑high inscription, the dorian institute, and just below it was an intercom. She stared at it for a moment, then said, "There, give it a buzz. I think there's a video camera around here somewhere. Last time I was here, they knew I'd arrived."
He reached out and touched a black button.
"Yes," came back a quick voice. She recognized it as belonging to the woman she'd spoken to on the phone.
"It's Alexa Hampton." She leaned over. "We talked—"
"Yes, I know, Ms. Hampton. He's been waiting for you."
A buzzer sounded and the two wrought‑iron gates slid back, welcoming them. As they drove down the tree‑lined road, an elegant three‑story redbrick structure with white Doric columns across the front slowly came into view.
"From here, it's pretty classy‑looking," Stone declared, sizing it up. "I know his big manufacturing‑and‑research campus is right down the road. But still, it sure feels godforsaken and lost out here in the middle of these pines. It's like the place is hiding from the world."
"Where better to do secret medical research," she said. "If you want to keep everything proprietary, then the isolation gives you a big jump on security."
She directed him to the side parking lot, where she'd left her car that morning.
"Stone, here's what we'll tell them. You're next of kin, a cousin on my mother's side."
"Works for me," he declared. "I'm beginning to feel part of the family anyway." He pocketed the car keys and helped her out of the Toyota.
As they headed up the wide steps, past the white columns, Ally felt a wave of nausea sweep through her. She reached out and took Stone's arm and sank against him.
"I'm... I'm not feeling at all well. Please let me hold—"
No sooner had she said it than the front door opened and two nurses appeared, their hair backlit from the glow of the reception area. She recognized one as Ellen O'Hara.
"Here, dear, let us help you," she said as she strode toward them. She was dressed in white and her eyes were flooded with concern. Ally looked through the doorway to see a waiting wheelchair.
"That's fast," Stone said. "Looks like they were ready for you."
My God, she thought, did they already know what kind of shape I'd be in? What else do they know? Surely Van de Vliet has heard by now that I'm aware of Kristen.
Then she saw him standing behind the nurses.
"Alexa, we need to get you downstairs as soon as possible." He was coming forward to help her settle into the wheelchair. He appeared to take no notice of Stone Aimes.
"I'm just feeling a little dizzy."
He smiled reassuringly. "There's always a small percentage chance that there may be side effects from the initial inoculation."
Huh?
"What 'initial inoculation'?" She bolted upright in the wheelchair. "I was just supposed to be giving blood."
"I thought Debra explained," he said, appearing confused. "There's always an initial . . . antibiotic dosage, just as a prophylactic." He shook his head in self‑blame. "I should have insisted you stay here, but after that . . . incident this morning I was so disoriented I let you talk me out of it. You may be having a reaction to the antibiotic, but it can't be all that serious. I didn't see anything about side effects in your file. We just have to get you horizontal for a while. Everything's going to be all right. In fact, this might be a positive development. With you here now, we can begin fine‑tuning your procedure immediately."
"Dr. Van de Vliet, this is my cousin Stone. He drove me here and I'd—"
"I'd really like to stay," Stone said reaching to shake Van de Vliet's hand. "It would mean a lot to both of us. To the whole family."
"Family?" Van de Vliet declared. Ally noticed that he was
examining Stone with narrowed eyes and seemed to be debating something with himself. "Well, we'll see." Then he turned back to her. "The first thing is to make sure your. . . situation is stabilized. I actually think a good night's rest might do the trick. But I need to run a quick blood test downstairs."
She felt her dizziness coming and going, but she was determined to stay awake and in control of what was being done to her.
"By the way, I was wondering how is Katherine Starr doing?"
His eyes grew somber. "She's a very lucky woman, considering. We've given her some coagulants and stitched her up."
"Are you going to press charges?"
He looked at her strangely. "Do you think we should?"
"I guess it's none of my business." Of course you won't, she told herself. The Kristen matter will not stand the ordinary light of day, let alone a police investigation.
"Maybe it's time to let her daughter come and see her."
"I looked at that letter," he said with a matter‑of‑fact tone. "I suspect it's a hoax. And a very cruel one at that."
"I don't think so. I talked to her today. The woman formerly known as Kristen. On the phone." She stared at him. "I really think it's time I learned more about what happened to her here at the institute. All I could really find out was that she thinks she's experienced some pretty dramatic memory loss."
He looked as though this information was new to him. He also looked startled. "You spoke to her? What . . . did she say? Is she all right?"
"No, she's not all right." Don't mention the kidnapping she told herself. Play dumb and see how he behaves. "I want to know what happened to her when she was here."
He paused, then took a deep breath. "I told you everything I know this morning. She was a very troubled young person. Her treatment seemed to be going well, but she couldn't accept that. She began to believe there was some kind of conspiracy against her. In a word, she became completely paranoid."
Well, Ally thought, there's "paranoid" and then there are times when somebody really is out to get you. So which was it in Kristen's case?
She glanced over at Stone, who appeared to be trying to act as though he didn't know what on earth she was talking about. But she could see him efficiently taking mental notes.
"When you can't remember who you are," she said turning back to Van de Vliet, "and then someone who does know who you are gives you a new, fake identity, I think it's enough to justify paranoia."
He was rolling the wheelchair toward the elevator but abruptly paused
"Is that what she's claiming? Good God I told you she was paranoid and that should demonstrate it better than anything. Letting her discharge herself and leave the program, to go off unsupervised was a truly bad idea, but nothing short of physical restraint could have stopped her."
"And do you have any idea where she is now?" Ally asked.
"I told you . . . Look, if I knew her whereabouts, don't you think I'd do everything I could to contact her, find out how she is?"
"Right."
She reached out and took Stone’s hand as they all moved onto the elevator. She could sense his excitement at finally being inside the Dorian Institute, but at that moment her concentration was drifting and she felt as though she were slowly beginning to drown in a sea of white.
"Stone, please don't leave me. Don't let me out of your sight. Something funny is happening and I don't know what it is."
Van de Vliet bent over. "Alexa, look at me. I want to see your eyes. I think they may be dilating." He waved a hand across her face. "Can you see me?"
"It's the fluorescent lights," she mumbled "There's too much glare. Could someone please turn them down? I think that's what's wrong. They're giving me a headache."
"Ally," Stone said, "the lights are not very bright in here. We're going down in an elevator. There aren't any fluorescents."
Then the elevator chimed and the door opened. They were in the basement now, where the research lab and the office and the examination rooms were. Debra, wearing a white lab coat, was standing there silently looking at her.
Now there really were fluorescent lights, and she turned away and tried to shield her eyes.
"God, turn them off. It's so painful. It's like they're shining into the back of my skull."
"She's started hallucinating," Van de Vliet whispered to Debra. "I've got to draw blood for a test and give her an injection. We need a gurney now. We've got to take her down to the IC. Her condition is progressing much more rapidly than I expected."
"Ally, is this what you want?" Stone demanded. "You don't have to do this."
Her breath was coming in rapid pulses now and she was cringing from the light even as she struggled to rise out of the wheelchair.
"I want . . . to get . . ."
She managed to pull herself onto her feet, but then she sagged and collapsed against Stone as he pulled her to him.
As one of the nurses grabbed the newly arrived gurney and pulled it over, Van de Vliet and Ellen O'Hara seized her out of Stone’s arms and lifted her onto it.
"You'll have to leave now," Van de Vliet said to Stone. "I'm sorry."
"I'm not going anywhere. I promised her I'd stay by her side and, by God, I intend to do just that."
"I'll determine what's best for her," he replied. "Please go up to the reception area. I'll let you know how she is."
"I'm not leaving."
"Then I'll call our security and have you removed from the premises."
"Stone," Ally said her eyelids flickering, "it's okay. I want you to tell my mother I'm here. She's in room two‑thirteen, upstairs, the last time I saw her."
"You've got it. Don't worry. I'll take care of everything."
She heard him saying that, but then she thought she heard another voice inside her head begging him not to leave. It was the last thought she had before the world went entirely white.