Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (146 page)

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IMPLANT

MICHAEL WALLACE & JEFFREY ANDERSON, MD

Copyright © 2011 by Michael Wallace and Jeffrey Anderson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author.

“
The Defense Sciences Office is interested in new proposals in BRAIN MACHINE INTERFACES. This new program represents a major thrust area that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multipronged approach with far reaching impact.”

Defense Science Office of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
9/17/2007

CHAPTER ONE

“Is it going to hurt?”

“A little.”

“‘Cause I can handle pain.” Ian Westhelle looked away as the anesthesiologist buried the 18-gauge needle just below the cord of his bicep. “I just don’t like needles. I prefer an honest fight.”

He watched the anesthesiologist slide the catheter into the vein and retract the needle in a single motion. A drop of blood welled at the mouth of the catheter. Satisfied the needle was out, Ian turned his gaze back to Dr. Julia Nolan.

“Any last questions?” Julia sounded like a dentist asking a kid if he wanted a sticker.

Damn straight he had questions. How does it work? What happens if it screws up? Will they actually read my mind? What is she wearing under those scrubs? Am I going to die?

“No questions.”

It didn’t matter. The decision was made. He’d won the lottery, signed the consent. Too late to back out, so why not get on with it?

When he’d met her two days ago, he’d thought it was a prank. Probably some chick Kendall met at a bar and conned into a practical joke. Would have been the first decent gag he’d seen since joining the CIA. But two days of questions, protocols, security paperwork, briefings, and MRI scans had been plenty convincing.

Sometimes he thought he was crazy to go through with it, but his ego wouldn’t let him back down. The underlying message went without stating. He was the best “the company” could find. They had an assignment that might get him killed. This might keep him alive.

Through all of it Julia had been more than patient. Attentive, reassuring, honest. She was upfront about risks. She admitted the procedure was new—she’d invented it. Half a dozen implants had already been performed—probably on baboons, knowing how these things went—but she claimed to have worked out the bugs.

Ian lay down on the narrow metal table. A C-shaped frame arced around the headboard. Julia had told him this was to take CT pictures during surgery to check placement of the leads.

He adjusted his head on the towel at the end of the table. “How do I know this whole operation isn’t a sham so she could see my tattoo?” he asked the anesthesiologist. He glanced down at the single Chinese character imprinted in black on his left chest and gave the man a half smile. The anesthesiologist raised an eyebrow at Julia.

“It’s lovely,” Julia said. “Does it mean anything or is it just an excuse to tear off your shirt and show girls your pecs?”

“It’s shorthand for ‘please be gentle, ‘cause I’m a big baby about needles and scalpels.’”

“You’ll be fine.”

He took a deep breath. “I know, I know. But can you tell this guy to give me the drugs already?”

Julia nodded at the anesthesiologist, who depressed the plunger to a syringe filled with opaque white fluid.

“Count backwards from 10,” Julia said.

Ian got to 9.

Julia grabbed the paper gown at her waist and pulled until the tie snapped. She pulled her arms out, wadded up the gown with her gloves inside, and tossed it in the red-lined metal hamper. She reached back to unfasten the lead vest and skirt and hung each one on a peg on the wall.

Her blue scrubs were damp down the center of her chest and under her arms. She drew her arm across her face, which smeared mascara across her sleeve. “Let plastics know we’re finishing up here,” she said to the charge nurse. Julia then pulled two blue gloves out of the dispenser on the wall.

Ian was just her patient, and she had no information about his intended mission, but she felt a connection with him and by extension with his mission. He seemed like a decent guy, full of bravado, but in a self-effacing way. Hopefully, the implant could help him.

“Peroxide.” She turned back to the scrub nurse, who was counting forceps. A paper boat of 4x4 gauze pads soaked in clear fluid appeared on the mayo stand. She picked off a few and scrubbed at the betadine on Ian’s chest, neck, and face. She grabbed a blue towel from the instrument tray to wipe off the rest of the orange dye, taking more care around incisions on Ian’s right breast, the base of his skull, above both ears, and on each temple.

She’d put in six devices, each one like a flat piece of cellophane, a few inches in diameter, studded with miniature metallic spikes. For each one, a braid of tiny wires snaked out one end. The implant itself came rolled up, and she inserted it into a small burr hole in the skull. With a flexible endoscope, she painstakingly unfolded it around the surface of the brain and embedded the thousands of tiny spikes into the brain tissue. The wires tunneled through the soft tissues of the neck until they connected to a small bio-computer implanted under the pectoral muscle.

Julia turned to the anesthesiologist. “How much fentanyl did you use?”

“100 mcg at induction.”

“Better give him another 50 now before plastics shows up.”

She’d closed plenty of wounds in her life, but this one was different. Ian didn’t just need a surgeon, he needed an artist. The plastic surgeons would rough up the edges of the wound on his chest, make it look like a battle scar rather than a precision surgical cut.

The door opened.

A metal cart wheeled through the door to the operating room, pushed by a twenty-something Asian man in jeans and a black t-shirt that read, ‘No, I will
not
fix your computer.’

“Keep him sedated please,” the man said.

“Who are you?” Julia asked. “And where’s the plastic surgeon?”

“I’m with applications. We need to do a firmware upgrade before bringing the implant online.”

“What are you talking about? The software is stable. We’ve tested it. What firmware upgrade?”

The Asian man stopped the cart. “They didn’t tell you?” He rolled his eyes. “Love this place. Fifty million bucks for the damn implant and the whole program is run like the DMV.” He shrugged. “Look, I don’t know who’s not talking to who, but I told Markov I needed to come in before your dude wakes up and download the latest patch.”

“You must be Hubert Chang. Lead programmer?”

“Right. You want me to wait while you check it out?” An edge of sarcasm.

Julia waved an arm and turned around. “No, go ahead. You’re sure it’s been vetted? What’s new?”

“Nothing, just adding a couple of new log files to the firmware. Waste of time if you ask me. All anyone cares about is more data, as if anyone ever reads the stuff we’ve already got. And I can’t even fart around here without writing up a use case. Can’t wait to get back to NSA. You people are really something.” He opened the laptop on the cart and aimed a wireless probe at Ian’s chest. When the computer logo appeared, he typed a password with one hand. A few keystrokes later a progress bar moved across a window on the computer.

“And that’s it?” she asked. “Just log files?”

“Oh, a few bug fixes, too, of course. Always have to tweak stuff, make it work better.”

________

Julia pushed through the door to the O.R. and strode down the hall. Chang may have been right that they were just documenting every step of the process, but that didn’t change the fact that nobody told her a thing. The whole operation was too secretive. That’s how mistakes happened. Nothing like this happened in private practice.

And bug fixes? What did that mean?

She began rehearsing the familiar lines. She didn’t have enough control. The timeline was too fast. She should have years for testing, and enough staff to do the job right. Damn their security. Is it so hard to find a few more people with top secret clearance? They were driving her out, and she could do just fine in private practice. Let them try and find another academic neurosurgeon willing to work under these conditions. She gave orders; she didn’t take them. She pushed open the door to the control suite.

Terrance Nolan, her husband, sat behind a computer monitor at his desk. His office enjoyed an expansive view over a wooded slope down toward the Potomac, but he usually kept the blinds drawn and today was no exception.

“Hey, sweetheart. How’d surgery go?” He stood up and opened his arms to give her a hug, then lowered them again when she stood in the doorway.

“What’s in the firmware upgrade?”

“Good to see you too.”

Her husband had worked for the National Clandestine Service, the operations division of CIA, for fifteen years. Julia didn’t like to admit it, but he had been the one who’d landed her this job. He’d stuck with her over the fourteen years they’d been married, through medical school, internship, residency, her academic job at George Washington. But it could have been worse. She was the only one in her class who made it through residency with her marriage intact.

She’d made a lot of promises. Good salary, decent benefits, residents to take call. Selling him on the academic lifestyle had been a good part of their conversation for the seven years of residency. Sure, it sucked now, but once she finished…

Only three years later as an assistant professor, things weren’t much better. She still took a lot of night call. It was hard enough to be junior faculty, but to be a woman meant that she was constantly fighting to be treated like a colleague. Every time Dr. Friedline gave a lecture, she was the one who took the extra call. Her discussions with her husband had turned to, “When I make tenure…”

But that wasn’t looking likely. Some of the faculty had never wanted her hired in the first place. Publications were scarce. Her research took time, and the department refused to cough up money for a grad student or ease off on her clinical responsibilities. The residents were no help. They already worked like dogs, and most just bided time until they could take a private practice job in spine surgery and start making real money.

Brain machine interfaces were the coolest thing going in neurosurgery, but you had to know everything. You needed an animal lab, needed programmers, neuroradiologists, circuit designers and nanotechnologists. It wasn’t the sort of thing a solo investigator could pull off.

Her luck started to change the day Terrance told her that the defense department had put out a solicitation for extramural proposals involving brain machine interfaces. Two months later, she submitted a grant proposal. Three days after that, two men in dark suits showed up at the hospital with an offer to work full time for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as chief investigator of a top secret implant program for the CIA.