Robin Cook - Host

“He’s not here,” Lynn yelled over the continuous noise.

A quick glance confirmed for Michael that cylinder 64 was empty, although the monitor displayed Carl’s home page, so it was where he had been or was to be.

“Just as well,” Michael yelled back.

“Do you want to see if Ashanti is here?”

“I don’t see any point,” Michael said without hesitation. “For the tenth time, let’s get a move on.”

“All right,” Lynn said, but still she hesitated. She had suggested seeking out Ashanti as a way to stall. Her irrational side wanted to wait for Carl to be returned as part of the continuous stream of patients coming and going on the conveyor system. At the same time, Lynn’s rational side agreed with Michael that they needed to leave. For a moment she struggled with her indecision, and as she did so her eyes caught the various color-coded and labeled lines that would be robotically connected to Carl when he was brought back to monitor him and keep him alive. There was the intravenous line in blue, an arterial line in red, a gastrostomy line for nutrition in green, and an intraperitoneal line in yellow.

Michael grasped Lynn’s upper arm. “I know it’s tough for you to leave, but it isn’t going to be any easier if you see him. We have to go!”

“I know,” Lynn shouted with a degree of resignation. “But look! Carl already has an intraperitoneal line!” She pointed to the yellow connector. “Why? He certainly doesn’t have ascites. Not yet, anyway.”

“We can debrief when we get out of this freaking place. We’ve got a lot to process.”

“You know what I think?” Lynn said with sudden urgency and a renewed degree of horror.

“I don’t, but I can tell you are about to tell me. But tell me out in the hallway, where I can hear you. This racket in here is driving me crazy.”

“All right!” Lynn yelled. The noise in the room was beginning to get to her as well. She let Michael pull her toward the walkway. It was just in time, because the conveyor system suddenly lurched in their direction again. When they reached the walkway, Lynn turned back to make sure the patient that was being brought in was not Carl, as the machine positioned itself in front of Carl’s stack. But the patient went into cylinder 62, not 64.

Quickly, they retreated to the door they had used to enter the room. When it closed behind them, their ears were ringing in the comparative silence. Immediately Lynn blurted out, “I think I know what the hell Sidereal is doing. They’re not experimenting on these patients, like we thought. They are fucking using them in a much more perverse way!”

“Okay, okay,” Michael soothed. “What do you mean?”

“You remember how monoclonal antibody drugs like ranibizumab are made.”

“Sure!” Michael said. He was taken aback by Lynn’s sudden passion. He could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes. “They are made by mice tumors called hybridomas.”

“Which are?”

“What is this, a freaking test? Tell me what you are thinking.”

“Answer my question! What are hybridomas?”

“A kind of cancer made by fusing mouse lymphocytes with mouse multiple myeloma cells and injected back into mice.”

“And where are they injected?”

“Into the abdomen.”

“And why are pharmaceutical companies required to jump through so many hoops to humanize the mouse-generated drugs?”

“To lower the chance of allergic reactions when they are taken by humans.”

Lynn stared at Michael without blinking, waiting for him to connect the dots. It was all there, hanging in the air.

“Mothafuckas!” Michael snapped after a moment when all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in his mind. He shook his head with repugnance.

“It all fits,” Lynn said with equivalent disgust. “All of it. Sidereal Pharmaceuticals and Middleton Healthcare are in bed together. It’s why so many people going into Middleton Healthcare hospitals are getting gammopathies. It’s why their patients have such a sky-high incidence of multiple myeloma. And here in the Shapiro it’s one hundred percent. They must be using all thousand patients to make truly human monoclonal antibody drugs, which don’t have to be humanized. They are already human!”

“And, worse yet, they must be behind these anesthesia-induced comas,” Michael said. “It must be a new method of recruiting healthy bodies they can tap twenty-four/seven. I’m sorry I have to say this, because of Carl.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Lynn said. Her voice reflected both anger and loss. She took a deep breath to stay in control. “Carl’s vegetative state wasn’t an accident. I was afraid as much when I found the looping. Now I know for sure. What I can’t understand is why we didn’t see all this earlier. When I think about it, it’s been staring us in the face.”

“The question now becomes what to do,” Michael said. “Who do we turn to?”

“This is a major conspiracy,” Lynn said. “We can’t go to anybody here in the medical center. There is no way to know who is involved and who isn’t. We’ve got to go to Carl’s father, Markus Vandermeer, and we have to do it tonight. In fact...” Lynn pulled out her cell phone. When she turned it on, she immediately saw there was no service. “Damn! I’ll have to call him as soon as we get outside.”

“Let’s go!”

“Wait! As long as we’re in here, I want to at least glance into the so-called recreation space. That’s sick humor if I ever heard it. There can’t be anything recreational about this place, but my thought is that maybe Carl is there.” Lynn pulled out the floor plans and quickly studied them. “Okay! I see where we have to go. It’s really close, and will only take a minute.”

Thursday, April 9, 1:04 A.M.

Misha had to knock to get the pocket door into the SCC, or Shapiro Central Control, to open. For security reasons, the only way it could be operated was from inside. He gestured for Fyodor and Benton Rhodes to precede him into the highly air-conditioned room. He followed. Five armed security men in hospital security uniforms brought up the rear. All were Russian expatriates and took orders from Fyodor. Fyodor had personally recruited them from Saint Petersburg when he’d taken over the hospital security department. He considered them his shock troops.

The technician manning central control was called Viktor Garin. He was dressed in Shapiro coveralls, in contrast to the newcomers. He remained standing as the others crowded around the bank of forty monitors that were alternately displaying security feeds from all of the hallways and a number of the rooms from all six floors of the Shapiro Institute.

Although part of Viktor’s job was to keep his eye on the security monitors, the vast majority of his time was spent on the other side of the room, in front of the feeds coming from the Shapiro automation equipment. It was with the machinery that most problems occurred. In the eight years he’d worked in the Shapiro, there had never been a security breach. The only infractions had been when several of the Shapiro staff members were caught sleeping.

Despite his being in the company of Benton, Fyodor spoke to Viktor in Russian, asking where the intruders were and what they had been doing.

“At the moment they are on floor four, heading for the recreation room,” Viktor answered in Russian. “So far they have only visited the NOC, where they used a terminal to access the data bank, and then went on to Cluster 4-B, where they spent most of their time. As I said, at the moment they are heading for the recreation room.” He pointed to the monitor that was tracking them in the fourth-floor hallway.

“What kind of data were they looking at in the NOC?” Fyodor asked.