Michael Palmer - Fatal

"How did you know I was here?"

"Sometimes I just know things."

"How's your headache?"

"Did you ever see Riverdance?"

"Ouch. I can have them give you some Tylenol, but I'd rather stay away from anything stronger."

"Tylenol will be fine. I'm tough."

"You don't have to convince me of that. The police guard is all set. You were right about Bill Grimes. He feels very protective toward you."

"I hope he can get to the bottom of this," she said.

"He's a pretty good cop." When lie wants to \›e. "Listen, I've got a house call to make, but I'm going to wait around the ICU until the guard gets here. You just go ahead and sleep. Right now that's the most therapeutic thing you could do."

"In a minute. Right now I'm wide awake. Can you sit for a little while? I sort of feel like Dorothy when she looked out the window and discovered she wasn't in Kansas anymore."

"I'd much rather talk with you than write progress notes."

"Thanks. The nurses tell me you trained at Harvard."

"I did my residency in medicine at White Memorial."

"I'm impressed. I wasn't accepted for their surgical program."

"Surgery?"

"I did a year of surg at Metropolitan then switched to pathology. I wanted my patients to lie really, really still when I was operating on them. Where did you live when you were there?"

"Beacon Hill. The poorer part at the bottom. I liked Boston pretty much, but my heart has always been here in the mountains. I couldn't wait to get back."

"That's not hard to understand. It's very beautiful here."

"When you're not being chased by a pair of crazed killers it is. Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"It's about your tattoo."

"What about it?" she asked with a slightly defensive edge to her voice.

"Oh, nothing. I just wanted you to know that I run into Gila monster tattoos on the top of doctors' feet all the time around here."

Nikki's eyes narrowed. Are you making fun of me they asked.

Matt leapt in to save the situation.

"Uh-oh, I'm sorry," he said. "Sounding flip when I shouldn't is one of my less desirable talents. It gets me into more hot water than a boiled lobster. Mea culpa." He pushed up his sleeve to reveal his own tattoo. "I'm into hawthorn trees, myself."

Nikki's expression softened.

"Sometime, you're going to owe me a story," she said. "Well, let's see. I had the tattoo put on a few years ago. Some of my musician friends were getting them and I decided I wanted one, too. I picked the dorsum of my foot so that I could see it whenever I wanted to, but I could also hide it whenever I wanted. I might have thought of some other location if I had known how much that one was going to kill. It's actually only half Gila monster. The front half is a salamander."

"Many of our doctors choose that variation," he commented in spite of himself.

Her eyes laughed. No problems this time.

"I once saw the combination on a clay pot at a Navajo reservation in Arizona," she went on, "and after the artist explained it to me, I ended up adopting the creation as sort of my totem. The salamander is shy, porous, vulnerable, weak, and secretive. The Gila is fearless, compact, warriorlike, determined, and so tenacious that when it grasps something with its thick jaws, one must often cut its head off to get it to let go."

Matt flashed on the horrible death of the beast in his dream and shuddered. He had never been one to reject the mystical or supernatural, beginning with dreams, and this one was bothering him more every second. Was the unsettling scenario merely replaying a version of the events recently past, or was it a vision of things yet to be?

"I can see how those two men on the highway got more than they bargained for," he said.

There was no response. Nikki's eyes were closed again, her brain muffled by exhaustion and the physiology of her concussion. The lingering effects of blunt head trauma were absolutely unpredictable and potentially devastating. Matt had seen professional athletes forced to the sidelines permanently, and others — intellectually sound initially with no visible changes on their MRIs — become significantly impaired over just a few days.

Silently, he prayed for Nikki Solari and the music that she made — with and without her violin. He stood, and before he turned away, impulsively reached out to touch her hand. At the last moment, he pulled back. The gesture would be perfectly innocent and natural with nearly all of his patients. But not, he had to admit, with this one.

With three quick raps, Dr. Richard Steinman gaveled to order the final meeting of the select commission on Omnivax. The scene outside the closed-door session was nothing like the throng of reporters and photographers that had covered Lynette Marquand's speech. But the media was still well represented. The drama of the First Lady's promise to go back to the drawing board with Omnivax if even one member of the august panel voted against it, coupled with the political and medical implications of the project, had kept interest high.

Around the elegant conference room, twenty-two physicians and scientists stopped their conversations and solemnly took their seats behind their name cards around the massive table. One place remained conspicuously empty — that of consumer representative Ellen Kroft.

"I would like to take this opportunity," Steinman began, "to thank each and every one of you for nearly three years of outstanding, deeply committed effort, which will culminate in this morning's vote. You have done a great service to your country, to the medical community, and ultimately to the people of the world. The agenda for this meeting is that you will individually be given the chance to make some final remarks on whatever subject you choose relative to the work we have been doing. After that, we will go around the table and each will vote Yea or Nay. For the purpose of the First Lady's promise to the American people, an abstention will not be viewed as a negative vote."

He paused, looking as if he had just swallowed an underchewed chunk of meat.

"Before we go any further," he said after clearing his throat and composing himself, "there is a statement I have been asked to read to you. It was delivered to me earlier this morning with a note stating that copies of it are being sent to the Washington Post and the New York Times, as well as to all four major TV networks and CNN. It is from Mrs. Ellen Kroft, who will not be here today. I'm sorry there wasn't time to provide each of you a copy, but one will be distributed to you by the time our session is over. I have been asked by Mrs. Kroft to read her statement to you in its entirety."

There was a stirring in the room and an exchange of glances. Some expressions were curious, some unabashedly disdainful. Seated next to Ellen Kroft's empty chair, George Poulos fixed his neutral gaze steadily on Steinman.

"There being no objections, then," Steinman said, "I shall proceed." He again cleared his throat, then adjusted his glasses.

"'Esteemed colleagues, as the lone consumer representative on the Omnivax commission I have approached my responsibilities not as the scientist and/or physician that all of you are, but as a mother and grandmother. From the day of our first meeting, I established three mandates for myself. The first was to learn as much as I was able about the process by which vaccines are developed, tested, approved, and later on evaluated once they are in general use. The second was to acquaint myself in depth with the components of Omnivax — their production, individual characteristics, and interactions one with another. And finally, to speak with a cross section of fathers and mothers in a number of communities, recording their hopes and, yes, their fears about vaccinations in general and Omnivax in particular. I would like to address these tasks in that order.