Mutant (18 page)

But as his strength drained, his resolve to hang on soon seemed a fleeting, doomed impulse, his thoughts of escape a pathetic fantasy. He found himself confronting the one last decision there remained in his power to make—how he would die. Better to slip into shock first, he coldly reasoned, in order to be as near unconscious as possible when he finally fell. Except he felt so woozy and drained of strength from pain that he’d no idea how much longer he could cling to the fence. To have any hope of hanging on for the time it would take to bleed himself into some degree of anesthesia, he’d have to release the pressure on his leg soon.

Once more the thought of Chet abandoned to grief flashed through his head. No! Damn it, I can’t take that way out, not while there’s the slightest chance.

He looked desperately over to the esplanade. It remained empty. He peered through the gloom toward Forty-second Street again.

The movement in the darkness occurred so slowly that at first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Seconds later a match flared in a shadowy corner near the entrance, illuminating a thin, pockmarked face under the peak of a security guard’s cap. Jesus Christ, thought Steele in horrified disbelief, the creep must have been standing there, watching all along! This wasn’t an accident.

An instant later the flame vanished, leaving him staring at the glowing tip of the man’s cigarette. Before he could recover enough to say anything, there came a shout from the walkway behind him.

“Hey, mister! Do you need some help?”

He craned his neck around and saw a woman bedecked in rain gear holding back a pair of waterlogged spaniels straining at their leashes to get into the fray.

“Yes! Call 911 for the police! There’s a maniac here who set his dogs on me. And an ambulance, too. They cut an artery!”

He saw her delve into one of her pockets and whip out a cell phone.

From the shadow where the man stood came a shrill whistle. As if a switch had turned off their rage, the dogs instantly spun about and bounded toward him as he rushed out the gate. Seconds later the black van squealed through a U-turn and disappeared back up Forty-second Street.

Chapter 12

“I know I can’t prove any of it, Greg. It’s just that the similarities in the two deaths—both men having their necks snapped—and an H5N1, or bird flu, outbreak being the only thing Oahu and Taiwan have in common . . . well, it’s got me spooked.”

“You really believe a geneticist in France and that farmer in Oahu were killed to cover up something about the bird flu? Come on, Kathleen. This morning I asked that you get me hard scientific evidence. Instead you show up back here tonight with conspiracy theories.”

She stiffened. His attitude had been increasingly skeptical since she first opened her mouth. She began to think it had been a mistake coming here to talk with him. After her last class they’d run into each other just as he’d been leaving for the day. On impulse she blurted out that there’d already been a new development since their morning meeting. He graciously insisted on hearing about it right away, and invited her to the faculty club for drinks. In the decorous setting of overstuffed, floral-printed sofa chairs, vases of fresh-cut spring flowers, and recessed lighting, he’d listened to her story, then proceeded to downplay what she’d told him.

“I don’t believe anything yet,” she countered. “I’m just saying that there’s an alarming possibility suggesting itself here.” She took a sip of her beer and wiped the foam off her lip onto the back of her hand.

Stanton left his white wine untouched on the table. “And I’m saying you’re speculating again. Christ! It’s exactly what I warned you not to do.”

“Look, I’ve always ridiculed the extremists in the environmentalist movement who concoct conspiracy theories about what the biotech industry is capable of doing to cover up its mistakes. But this is different, and it’s personal.”

“I don’t get what you mean.”

“Because, Greg, if that old man getting killed in Kailua has anything to do with a bird flu outbreak that happened eighteen months ago, then isn’t it obvious by the timing that they weren’t just worried about him?”

“You’re not suggesting what I think you are?”

“You’re damn right I am. It couldn’t just be a coincidence that they killed him within days of my going out there and demanding soil samples to test for genetic vectors. I’ve got to consider that they wanted to kill me as well.”

“Oh, my God, Kathleen, that’s absolute paranoia! If the board gets wind of you going around spouting stuff like that, no way can I help you keep your position on staff. Please, drop it now, before you do your career more damage than I can repair.”

“Really, Dr. Stanton, I am not paranoid,” she shot back, giving free rein to her Irish temper. His sitting there in his deluxe suit, all pampered and comfortable while dismissing her fears, left her wanting to douse him with his wine. “There’s a solid logic to back up the idea of those men with silencers being hit men and me as their intended target.”

“Dr. Sullivan, I really don’t want to get into this—”

“You’ll be hearing me out, Greg Stanton!” she interrupted. “And then you can dismiss me as nuts or let Aimes and his cronies have their way with my career— whatever you want.”

He opened his mouth as if to reply, eyed her expression as her fury grew, and seemed to change his mind.

“Every detail fits,” she continued. “Their keeping him cooped up in that sweltering house with all the windows closed, so I wouldn’t hear any noises he made that might tip me off; their waiting to kill him until I arrived, in order for our times of death to be similar; the fact that they avoided using a gun on him, yet were willing to put a bullet in me and then were going to burn the place in a clumsy attempt at arson—it’s all consistent with their setting a scene. One intended to make the police think that robbers were attempting to make the first death look like an accident, and that they then shot me only because I blundered into what they were doing.”

“Now why would they go to all that trouble?” While his tone retreated into a cold civility, his eyes said she was nuts.

“Because the killers couldn’t make it obvious they wanted me dead without also making it pretty clear they were trying to stop me from running tests on the samples.”

Stanton wearily shook his head and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. “Have you told these ideas of yours to anyone else, Kathleen?” he asked, cupping his face in the palms of his hands and massaging his temples with his fingertips.

“Why, yes, I discussed it with a few close colleagues. Why?”

Stanton peered up at her and sighed, sliding his fingertips to the corners of his eyes where he continued to work them in small circles. “Who?”

“Uh, Dr. Doumani, my chief technician . . . uh . . . Steve Patton of course—he and I have been working together on this subject for years, so we routinely exchange information.”

She didn’t add how precarious their professional association had become recently. To his credit, though, Steve’s response to her story had been enthusiastic. “Now you’re getting somewhere,” her former lover had told her. “Let me know if I can help.”

“And I tried to run it by Dr. Steele,” she continued to tell Stanton, “to see what he thought, since he’s up to speed on the issues and has a fresh point of view—”

“And what did Richard make of your ideas?”

“I don’t know. I left a message on his answering machine earlier, but he didn’t get back to me yet. He may still be avoiding my calls.”

“I see. And you’ve spoken to nobody else?”

“No. Why?”

“Because I’m still going to try and protect you from Aimes and the board, Kathleen. So don’t blab a word of this to any more people than you already have, understand, and stick to getting hard scientific evidence as we planned. Now, when are the specimens arriving from France?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“And how long do you think it will take before you finish running tests on them?”

“With my team working full out on it, about three weeks.”

“As I explained this morning, that’s a long time to stall with nothing but hot air. Just as we agreed for the Hawaiian data, you’ll have to give me anything that turns up right away.”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s settled then.” He leaned back and finally took a sip of his wine. “You know what?” he asked, a genuine smile recruiting his eyes as it spread across his face. “If any of that data of yours shows a link between bird flu and genetically modified food, we could be looking at Pulitzer money. Hell, maybe even a Nobel Prize.” He toasted her with his glass, placed it back on the table, still virtually full, and placed his hands on the armrests of his chair, ready to push off. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get home to my wife and daughters.”

When he arrived through the door by ambulance, instead of behaving as a patient, he started ticking off what his staff and residents did to him like an auditor. IVs were running within seconds. Cardiac and blood pressure monitors had his vitals pegged before they even asked him his insurance number or mother’s maiden name. Then a nurse gave him a shot of midazolam, and he stopped caring.

He floated between vaguely interested and asleep as the residents poked about in his wound. “Stirred, not shaken,” he quipped when one of them returned with a syringeful of antibiotics and mixed it in with the contents of his IV bag. He then listened in on their conversations about the artery having a longitudinal tear, and the caliber of the stream being a reflection of the length of the rip, not the size of the vessel involved.

“Just tie the damn thing off!” Steele heard himself growl from far away.

“All in all, Richard, it’s not too bad,” the chief of vascular surgery told him when he arrived dressed in a tuxedo, obviously having deserted some society function in order to come in. It was the kind of professional courtesy a doctor would usually extend to a colleague. “We’ll be able to do the repair under local.”

He drifted in and out after that, wriggling his toes when they asked, listening as the senior resident who’d “done one” talked the junior who hadn’t through the repair, and watching the shreds of skin and muscle he wouldn’t need anymore pile up in the kidney basin they’d wedged between his thighs. At one point he could hear so much snipping and cutting down there that he loudly accused them of trying to take off his “whole friggin’ leg!” A second hit of midazolam returned him to the state where he didn’t mind if they did.

“This is quite a file we’re getting on you, Dr. Steele,” joked the head nurse afterward as she anchored the dressings to his calf. “Two visits in six months.”

“Right.” He smiled wanly, embarrassed at the ruckus he’d caused. He detested being on the wrong side of the white coats among his staff and residents. To make matters worse, he’d had to lie facedown as they’d all worked on him. At the scene of his greatest triumphs, where he’d held command over matters of life and death, he was reduced to worrying whether his backside hung out the back flaps of his hospital gown.

“Where do you want this?” the nurse asked, her eyebrow doing a suggestive jackknife as she stood over him drawing up a syringeful of tetanus toxoid for his booster shot.

He demurely offered her a bare shoulder.

“But that’s no fun,” she pouted, and then drove the needle deep into his nearest cheek.

He then asked for a phone, so he could call Martha and Chet. They must be worried sick about him.

“Oh, I’m sure he’s just run into one of his cronies at the hospital and lost track of the time,” Martha McDonald reassured as she passed yet another cup of tea to her visitor. “I’d call him on his cell phone, but he’s stopped wearing the damn thing lately.”

“That’s fine, I don’t mind waiting,” replied Kathleen Sullivan, feeling increasingly embarrassed at being there at all. She’d come on an impulse, determined to see the man and telling herself that even if he didn’t want to talk with her he had to be warned about the threat to his job.

After saying good night to Stanton, she’d swung by her apartment, showered, and slipped into a pale green blouse with a matching skirt. She added a pair of small emerald earrings that she hardly ever wore, took a few swipes with a brush at her short, ever-practical hair, and headed toward the door. “I won’t be long, Lisa,” she called over her shoulder.

The skinnier, younger copy of herself looked up from watching television. “Oooh, Mom’s got a date,” she teased.

“And what makes you think that, smart aleck? I’m off to a business meeting is all.”

“Then how come you put on
the emeralds
, Mommy dear?”

Sullivan gave her daughter a wry grin. “You are an imp!”

“And you’re beautiful, Mom. Have a good time.”

She’d felt like a nervous schoolgirl when she rang his doorbell and asked to see him. The housekeeper had stared so unbelievingly at her that at first she thought it must be the wrong house.

“Please, come in,” the woman had finally said. “I’m sorry to have acted so surprised, except he hardly has any visitors,” she added, and led her into the room where they now sat. That had been an hour ago, and they’d been making small talk ever since. As they chatted, Sullivan had a chance to survey the surroundings. A grand piano, the top down and keyboard closed, dominated everything. The rest of the furniture looked tasteful yet comfortable, luxurious plants grew in every nook, and the walls were painted a warm yellow. It must be wonderfully sunny in here during the day, she thought. But what really got her attention were all the photographs.

She’d gotten up to take a closer look at a cluster of them while Martha prepared tea in the kitchen. In each she saw a smiling, dark-haired woman with thick wavy hair and wonderful warm eyes. A lot of the shots had caught her during candid domestic moments—waving a spatula at a barbecue grill like a female d’Artagnan; ducking a splash at a poolside; laughing while holding up a small boy who had thick, unruly black curls and brown eyes identical to hers. Others, especially the ones where the child appeared much younger, captured her during more posed moments, but nothing had tamed her magnificent smile. It’s the look of a woman who knows she’s loved, thought Sullivan.

Steele appeared in some of the frames, but most of the time he seemed to have been the photographer. Where he’d taken lone photos of just the boy, they were the same sort of first-time milestones she herself had captured on film with Lisa—the child proudly riding a bike, his holding up a fish in triumph, or the little fellow scoring a goal in a soccer game.

Minutes later when the older version of that child had come downstairs to say hello in person—“I like your programs on TV,” he told her shyly—she estimated it had been about two years since any new images of all that youthful happiness had been added to the walls.

“Are you sure I can’t get you something to eat, Dr. Sullivan?” Martha inquired for what must have been the sixth time.

“No, I’m fine, thank you,” Sullivan insisted yet again, just as from somewhere in the house came the sound of a phone ringing. Martha excused herself to answer it.

Within minutes all three of them were in Sullivan’s car, racing the short distance to the hospital. “Imagine that man,” grumbled Martha. “Attacked by dogs, then insisting we don’t make a fuss and telling us not to come in!”

Sullivan discreetly remained in the waiting room of the Emergency Department while the other two ran through a set of swinging doors that read NO ADMITTANCE. As she loitered among all the walking wounded and watched the ambulance stretchers stream in, she felt the sense of awe that always overtook her whenever she passed by an ER. The sheer brutality of the trauma and illness she witnessed here seemed so far removed from her own molecular take on life. Yet it struck her that this gallery of human agony gave as true a glimpse of Richard Steele’s world as the photos back in his living room. What special courage he must have, she marveled, to treat such extremes in suffering day after day. And at one time, it seemed, he’d possessed the strength to remain sufficiently unhardened by the carnage that he could still love the extraordinary woman whose ghost now looks down from the walls of his living room.