"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.