Syndrome by Thomas Hoover (read along books txt) 📖

“But if Kristen is—”

“Ally, you ‘re the one I’m worried about. I thought what they were going to do to you was safe. But last night I… I heard them all talking and I think you could be in serious danger. They don’t actually know what the consequences of what they’re doing will be. You need to get out of here and at least get the real story. I don’t want this on my hands. Truthfully, there could be some deep legal shit coming out of all this. I can think of at least three felonies. I don’t want any part of that liability, and I want you to testify that I got you out of here if it ever comes to that.”

Finally the straight story, she thought. He’s afraid he’s about to be an accomplice in a criminal conspiracy. He’s getting cold feet.

“Grant, do something for me. Get me unplugged. All these sensors. I want to go see her for myself.”

“Ally, forget it. To begin with, I can’t unplug you. Only a nurse can do that. And I don’t want to. You’ve got catheters in places I-”

“Then I’ll get a nurse to come and do it. I’ll say I need to go to the bathroom. That should get me unhooked.”

Annoyed she looked around. Where’s the buzzer? There has to be one somewhere. Then she spotted a set of controls attached to the bed and sure enough, there was a red button. What else could it be?

She pushed it and a light came on above her door. Moments later, a short blue-haired woman with the name MARION sewn into her white uniform opened the door and came striding in, flicking on the fluorescent overheads.

“My, my, we’re looking well,” she declared ignoring Grant. “I’m glad you’re finally awake. He told us to call him the minute… They’re all saying you and your mother must have special genes. You’ve both been such terrific patients. He’d been keeping you sedated but he discontinued that medication this afternoon. He wanted you to wake up with your mind clear.”

“Well, I’d really like to get up and go to the bathroom and get something to eat,” Ally said “Mainly, I just want to get out of this bed for a stretch before I start developing bedsores. I’m feeling strong, for now at least. Can you unhook some of these wires and suction cups? And I certainly don’t need that IV. I’m so hungry I could inhale a quart of ice cream in one gulp.”

“Yes, of course,” Marion said and began dismantling the intravenous tubes. “We only monitor you and hydrate you when you’re not conscious. The standard procedure is to let you get up and start getting some exercise as soon as possible. You should be careful, though, because at this point you’re not as strong as you think. Changes are taking place in your body that require a lot of your energy. If you feel up to it, you could walk around for a couple of minutes, but you shouldn’t let yourself get tired.”

As Marion continued now removing the taped-on sensors, Ally looked up and saw another uniformed nurse standing in the doorway. She also was middle-aged, with prematurely gray hair, and she was holding a syringe.

“May I come in?” she asked. “At this stage he needs a blood sample every three hours. Just twenty cc’s.”

Ally watched as the new nurse quickly and deftly took a small sample of blood. Then she capped it off and turned to leave.

“I need to centrifuge this immediately.”

And she was gone.

Then Marion finished removing the IV tube and catheter and all the taped-on electrodes.

“If you want to get up and use the bathroom and walk around a little, I’m sure it would be all right. I’ll come back in a few minutes and bring you a tray with a nice healthy bowl of broth.”

The moment she was out the door, Ally turned to Grant.

“I want to see Kristen. Now.”

“I thought the first thing you wanted was to go to the bathroom.”

“I’ll get to that. You said she was downstairs somewhere. How do I get there?”

“It’s in the security zone,” he said. “You’re not authorized—”

“You’re a big shot around here. Winston Bartlett’s right-hand flunky. So why don’t you authorize me yourself.”

“Ally, you know I can’t do that.”

“Then take me there.”

“I don’t want to see Kristen anymore,” he declared, biting his lip. “She’s completely lost… everything. I could deal with it until I saw her this morning. It’s just too much.”

“Has he let her mother see her?”

“Are you kidding? Letting that psycho anywhere near her is the last thing anybody’s going to do.”

“Then get me in, dammit.”

“Ally, forget about it.”

“Why?”

He hesitated, as though marshaling his thoughts.

“Sis,” he said finally, “there’re only so many risks I can take for you, and they have to be about something that matters. Forget about Kristen. Nothing can save her now. But I’m offering to help you get out of here before they go any further. I can’t be seen helping you, but they’ve started you down a road that you don’t want to go, believe me. I got you into this, but if there’s still time, I want to try to help get you out.”

She didn’t know what was going on, but if Grant of all people was freaked about what Karl Van de Vliet had in store for her, then maybe she’d better take it seriously.

But she was through relying on him for anything.

“Okay, but I want to call somebody to come and get me.”

“Are you referring to that reporter, by any chance?” he asked. “The guy who drove you here? W.B. hates him.”

“Yes.” She was puzzled that he would know about Stone. “How do you—”

“Bartlett has him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s radioactive now. I actually kicked him out of here myself yesterday. This is not a moment for press freedom. He could screw up everything. W.B. said he’s doing a book. No way is that guy going to be allowed human contact with anybody till the sale of Gerex is in the bank. He had a run-in with Bartlett in the city and they took him somewhere. I don’t know the location. And I don’t want to know.”

“Oh my God.”

“He’s most likely okay. It’s just temporary safekeeping.”

“All the more reason I’m not leaving till I see Kristen.”

“There’s no way you’re going to get into where they’re keeping her, Ally.”

“All right.” There was no arguing with him when he was this freaked. “What do you want me to do?”

He pulled a plastic card out of his jacket pocket. It was white, with THE GEREX CORPORATION embossed on one side and a magnetic strip on the other.

“This is a master key to this place. Because of security, you can’t just go out the front, through the lobby. But if you take the elevator down to the first floor of the basement, where the lab is, there’s a fire exit there, in the back, that opens onto a path down to the lake. If you’ll go out that door and wait right there, I’ll come around and get you to the parking lot. I know a way that will miss their surveillance cameras. I’m scheduled to go back to the city now and I’ll take you with me.”

“But if I wanted to see Kristen?”

“You’d have to go into the laboratory and then take the elevator that’s inside there. Don’t even think about it. It’s way too risky.”

She looked at him, trying to gauge his sincerity. Had he become a new man, finally caring about somebody other than himself? Or had a glimpse of whatever had happened to Kristen scared the hell out him and awakened the specter of being part of a felonious enterprise?

“Why are you doing this?”

“To make up for a few things,” he said, turning to leave.

With that, he walked out and quietly closed the door.

That remains to be seen, she told herself.

She went to the bathroom, then put on a bathrobe and headed out into the hallway. The nurse’s station was not occupied. Marion was still in the kitchen on the first floor, presumably.

Good.

She was feeling shaky, not nearly as strong as she’d initially thought she was, but she pressed on, taking the elevator, her first use of Grant’s Gerex master key. She bypassed the first floor and an instant later she was stepping into the basement’s laboratory area.

At the moment it appeared to be entirely deserted, though the fluorescent lights bathed the space in a stark, pitiless light.

Down the hall was Dr. Van de Vliet’s office and the examining room, where she and her mother had gone when they were being admitted. At this time of night, everything was closed and probably locked.

She turned and looked at the forbidding entryway to the glass-enclosed laboratory. Through the transparent walls she could see the dim glow of CRT screens and incubators filled with petri dishes. And there at the back was-could her eyes be trusted?-the outline of an elevator door. She hadn’t noticed it until this minute. It seemed to be built with a nod toward camouflage.

It could lead to Kristen, she told herself. Find out what Grant is so freaked about. He can wait a couple of minutes.

She was starting to feel even weaker, but she pressed on. Next to the heavy steel, high-security air lock leading into the laboratory was a card reader and she swiped the white card through the slot.

The air lock opened silent and perfunctory. When she went through, the door behind her automatically closed and then the hermetically sealed door in front of her opened. She was in.

Next a bright fluorescent light clicked on, all by itself.

“Jesus!”

Maybe it was connected to a motion sensor. Or on a timer.

Then she looked around. This, she thought, is the place where the Gerex Corporation has supposedly changed medical history. What was created in this very room had if Grant was telling the truth, saved her mother’s sanity. And if she could believe the monitors she had looked at in her room, her own heart condition had begun to be reversed after a lifetime of progressive decline.

Yet something about it had been pushed too far. Somewhere in the midst of this miracle, the Gerex Corporation had done something so obscene no one could even talk about it.

She looked around the laboratory, wishing she could understand what she was seeing. It smelled like solvent, acetone, with a mingling of more pungent fumes. The black slate laboratory workbenches were spotlessly hygienic and equipped with several large microscopes that featured flat-panel screens. She noticed a heavy server computer at the back, presumably networked to all the terminals in the building, and then she remembered that Van de Vliet had once spoken of computer simulations.

Someday soon, she told herself, she was going to understand what really was going on here, but for now she headed for the elevator.

Another zip of Grant’s white card and the door opened. There was indeed a floor below the laboratory, and she pushed the button. The Dorian Institute was all about security, but this subbasement area was doubly secure.

After a quick trip down, the elevator door opened onto another air lock chamber, this an exit from the pressurized environment of the laboratory.

Why, she wondered, had no one spotted her yet? Perhaps this part of the clinic was such a lockdown that nurses and guards weren’t necessary.

As she stepped from the air lock, she was in a hallway. She walked down and tried the first unmarked door. It was locked, but then she saw the