Thomas Hoover - Syndrome

Stone listened, trying to internalize what he was hearing. Not only did Winston Bartlett know about him, he was finally thinking about acknowledging him. Sort of.

Or was this just a bribe to hush him up?

Either way, it was too little, too late.

"You've never given me anything and I've sure as hell never asked. I'd just like for you to get out of my way so I can do my job."

Bartlett stalked toward the door. Then he turned back.

"You'd better think long and hard about what you're getting into. You can ask some of the two-bit reporters I've dealt with in the past. They're fucking road kill."

With that pronouncement, he slammed the door and was gone.

Stone stared after him, feeling his heart pump. It wasn't the threat; it was the mixed emotions. For a moment, in spite of his better judgment, he'd felt like he had a father, but then Bartlett became the enemy again.

Then the door cracked open and Jane appeared, dismay in her eyes.

"What was that about?"

"What was what about?"

"I've gotta tell you, that man doesn't know how to keep his voice down. What was that about helping your mother? Karen. You never talked about her much, but I sure don't remember you ever saying anything about her and Winston Bartlett."

"That's because I didn't. Jane, there are parts of my past life that I try not to think about any more than I have to."

"After the fact, it's nice to know that there were parts of your life that you didn't see fit to share with me." She sniffed.

"Maybe someday."

"It's a little late for that," she declared, hurt lingering in her voice. "Look, Stone, I don't know what you know that's got Bartlett so upset, but he's not the best guy in the world to piss off. He stormed in here, fit to be tied, personally demanding to know how the hell did you have proprietary information about the Gerex Corporation's clinical trials. He already seemed to know who you were. Now I realize there's more to the story, somewhere back there in time."

"And what did you tell him?"

"I was completely blindsided for which I thank you. I told him I didn't know anything about your sources, but I wouldn't reveal them even if I did. He's our landlord but that doesn't give him subpoena power. He doesn't have the right to barge in here and try to intimidate the Sentinel 's staff. We're current on the rent."

Stone felt a tinge of nostalgia. Sometimes her gold-plated bitchiness was the very thing he admired most about her.

"Well, thanks for sticking up for me. Maybe I've got him upset enough that he'll come around eventually and decide it's better to have me inside the tent, where I can be monitored."

She snorted at the improbability of that.

"No, Stone, as usual you're an idiot idealist and dreamer. I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen. Bartlett is most likely on his cell phone right now, as we speak, threatening the Family, trying to get you fired. He's saying you're stealing proprietary information somehow and he's going to sue the Sentinel for our last dime if we print a syllable of anything you write about him. That's his next move, Stone. I expect my phone to ring in approximately fourteen and a half minutes. Their attorneys are going to tell me to tell Jay to get you under control. That's what's going to happen. The Family does not want Winston Bartlett pissed off. Especially by the likes of you, somebody who's always writing muckraking articles that make them real nervous. Does anything I've said have the ring of logic to you? Or are you living in some never-never land where the facts don't fucking penetrate?"

Hey , he thought, that's pretty good. Jane is in DEFCON 1 mode today.

"Depends on what you look at, the doughnut or the hole. That is, the stick approach or the carrot. I'm betting he's going to split the difference and try a little of both. He's going to cool off and then offer me a few crumbs as an inducement to go away."

"God, you're so naive." She laughed in derision. "Winston Bartlett is not accustomed to having to ask anybody for anything. So the fact he came up here this morning to try to get you to back off on whatever it is you're doing must mean you've really got him psyched." She stared at him. "What is it, Stone? Tell me. What do you have on him?"

"Right now I'm more interested in what he thinks I might have. And the truth is, I don't really know. But it must be something pretty big."

"Stone, why is it so hard to hate you? You can make a person's life miserable and that stupid person will still root for you. God, I don't know what it was about you." She paused a moment as though thinking. "Maybe you're just too honest. Or just too sincere. Maybe that's what it was."

"Don't try to butter me up. I know my weaknesses. But dammit, Jane, I'm this close to the story of the century. And the paranoid zillionaire who was in here just now yelling at me is trying to freeze me out"

"Well, please don't involve me in this anymore, Stone. You've just provided me with a week's worth of unnecessary shit. From now on, any communicating you want to do with Gerex's attorneys is going to have to be done by someone else. Trust me when I tell you I do not need this in my life."

"Sweetie, wait till you see what I'm on the track of. What the Gerex Corporation is doing at a small clinic out in New Jersey is going to change everything we know about medicine. And it's going to blow wide open the second they finally let the press in on what's happening at the clinical trials they're now winding up for the NIH. When they finally hold that big press briefing, I want to have a manuscript already in copyediting. I want to be first ."

"Then why is he so worked up over your question?" she mused. "About somebody being dropped from the clinical trials?" She paused "Incidentally, I can do without being called 'sweetie' by a man I'm no longer screwing."

"Sorry about that." He winced. It did just sort of slip out in this orgy of intimacy. "But what I think Bartlett desperately doesn't want me to find out is the reason that patient was dropped. And he's afraid I'm getting close. Unfortunately, I'm not, and I just took my best shot at prying the information out of him and-you're probably right-blew it." He was turning to leave. "But I'm, by God going to find out somehow. Just see if you can keep me from getting fired for a little while longer. If I'm still working for the Sentinel three months from now, you may get honorable mention in my Pulitzer acceptance."

It was bluff talk. But he believed it with every fiber of his body. You've gotta believe, right?

Come on, Ally, get lucky. Find out who that mystery patient was. The way things look now, you 're the only shot I've got left.

Tuesday, April 7

8:13p.m.

What a day! When Ally finally settled onto her couch, after giving Knickers a long walk, she was exhausted. She leaned back and kicked off her shoes. There had been a few moments of tightness in her chest-maybe it was psychological, anxiety-induced-but that was gone now. She thought about calling New Jersey to ask how Nina was doing, but she doubted they would tell her anything.

She'd spent the latter part of the afternoon getting yet another heart exam. After driving to northern New Jersey and back, she'd had a formal (and exhausting) stress test for her heart at the New York University Faculty Practice. God, she was sick of examining rooms and those blue paper shifts you put on backwards, as though it was okay for doctors and nurses to see your bare ass. Then she put on shorts and sneakers and an Israeli physician stuck wired suction cups all over her chest and put her on a treadmill for seventeen minutes, boosting her pulse to over 150, which was as high as he dared to go. Then he called Van de Vliet, faxed him the charts, and they reviewed the squiggly lines for another ten minutes. Finally she had a high-speed CT scan, whose results were then sent directly to Karl Van de Vliet's lab computer.