because she looks like she could be perfect, in a lot of ways.'
'What am I looking at?' Debra asked, scrolling the page. 'Is this what I think it is?'
'It's her medical history.'
'How did you get it?' She turned back. 'Did she send it?'
'No, Deb, and I don't think you really want to know.'
'Somehow, I think I probably should.' She looked again at the screen. 'We're in this together.'
'All I know is, I got an e-mail from Grant Hampton, and this was an attachment. She must have been keeping it on a computer somewhere. I understand he's her brother, but how he got it, I have no idea. He said we're not supposed to let her know we have it.'
'How recent-'
'This final battery of tests is less than two weeks old,' he said, pointing to the date on the corner of the page. Then he scrolled. 'Take a look at her high-speed CT scan. See that degenerative calcification there. Now look at the same test last year.' He scrolled past a number of pages. 'See.' He tapped the screen, then scrolled back to the first image. 'Over the past year there's been a significant buildup. She's made-to-order for the clinical trials.'
And there was another reason he wanted her, which he was reluctant to admit to himself. There was a photo of Alexa Hampton in her medical files and something about her reminded him of Camille. Her eyes had a lot of spirit. They made you want to root for her. It was nothing short of ironic that this woman had the exact same medical condition that took the life of Camille, who had been at his side during the early stages of the research that now might provide a cure. But for Camille it had come too late. It was more than ironic; it was heartbreaking. Now, though, to save Alexa Hampton would be a kind of circular recompense. He took a last look, then closed the file.
'Does she want to be in the clinical trials? There's not much time left. We'd have to get her-'
'I just left a message at her office,' he said revolving around in his chair. 'Grant has talked to her, and so has W.B. This very morning. She's aware that time is of the essence. But there's no guarantee she'll do it.'
He glanced at his mute phone. If she didn't call back today, he had a feeling that Winston Bartlett might just have her seized and brought to the institute by force.
'I see that her blood type is AB,' Debra said. 'Extremely rare.'
Funny she should notice, he thought. Is she going to put it together?
'That's the same as Bartlett's blood type,' she continued. 'Interesting coincidence, huh?'
'Right.'
'You're already fond of her, aren't you?' Deb asked finally. He detected the usual tinge of rivalry seeping into her voice. 'Without even meeting her.'
The truth was, Karl Van de Vliet was turned on by Debra Connolly. What red-blooded primate wouldn't be? But she was half his age and to act on that attraction would be to guarantee trouble. He had enough to worry about without a lab romance. Besides, he was still thinking about Camille. They'd had the kind of long-lasting, thick-and- thin love Debra would never understand.
However, she did sufficiently understand the problems with the Beta procedure and the Syndrome, so he had to flirt back. She had to be kept on the reservation. Feign an interest but not enough for it to go anywhere.
'Deb, she's just an ideal fit for the study, that's all. Nothing more.'
The stem cell procedure for her stenosis should go forward with only minimal risk. There was every reason to hope he could rejuvenate the tissue in Alexa's left ventricle. It was merely an extrapolation of the kind of heart procedure that had worked such a wonder for Emma Rosen.
The real challenge was simultaneously attempting the Beta- related procedure. The trick was to stimulate the development of antibodies through a moderate dosage of the special Beta enzyme, tempering it enough that it didn't go critical and begin replicating uncontrollably, the way it had in Kristen, and (probably) very soon in W.B. Not so low as to be inoperative but not so high that it would go out of control. The 'Goldilocks dosage,' not too much, not too little. The problem was, he wasn't absolutely sure what that dosage was.
Should he tell Alexa Hampton the full story about what he was doing? About the Beta? That ethical question, he had decided, he would leave to Grant Hampton, Bartlett's hustler of a CFO. It was his sister, after all. Presumably, he'd tell her whatever she needed to know to make an informed decision. Let the responsibility be on his head.
The phone on his desk finally rang.
Chapter 10
Stone Aimes was floating through cyberspace, through the massive data pages of the National Institutes of Health. Since the Gerex Corporation had a complete clampdown on their clinical-trial results, he was attempting an end run. By going to the source, he was hoping he could find out whether or not Karl Van de Vliet's experiments with stem cell technology were succeeding.
He needed that information to finish his book, and he hoped that the remainder of the advance could be used to pay for his daughter Amy's private school in New York, if he got it in time. He was dreaming of a life in which she could come back to live with him at least part of the year. Sometimes, particularly days like this-Monday was his official day off-he couldn't avoid the fact he was incredibly lonely.
But first things first He had gone to the section that described the many and varied clinical trials the NIH had under way. Then he used 'scrambled eggs,' the entry protocol given to him by Dale Coverton, to circumvent security on the site and get him into the second-level NIH data files. He was hoping to find the names of patients who had gone through the Gerex stem cell procedure and could be interviewed.
It really wasn't all that difficult, or even-he told himself-unethical to get in this far. No big deal. Entry protocols were available to any high-level NIH employee who had the right security grade. Now he was poking through the reams of proprietary data that the Gerex Corporation had submitted to initiate the clinical trials.
It was one of the more ambitious studies he'd ever seen, not in numbers of patients necessarily but certainly in scope. They were indeed running stage-three clinical trials of their stem cell procedure on a variety of maladies. There was no double-blind placebo. You either were cured or you were not.
Jesus, it was incredible. They were shooting for nothing less than the unified field theory of medicine, aiming not just to patch some failing element of the human body but to regenerate entire organs. Among their stated objectives were building pancreatic islets, reconstructing the ventricles of the heart, reconstituting the damaged livers of individuals with advanced cirrhosis. They were also accepting patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
'Christ,' he said, scrolling past page after page, 'how come they're suddenly so secretive about this?'
If Van de Vliet had achieved results in just a fraction of those trials, it would herald the beginning of a new age in medicine.
The NIH monitor for the Gerex trials was Cheryl Gates, just as Dale had said. Her photo was featured along with the introductory description of the trials. Nice-looking, he thought, probably late thirties, dark hair, dark- rimmed glasses. She wasn't wearing much makeup in the photo, probably to emphasize how serious she was. Sooner or later, he told himself, he had to find a way to meet her. ..
He stared at his IBM Aptiva screen a moment longer, overwhelmed at what he was seeing, then got up and walked into the kitchen and made a peanut butter sandwich, whole wheat. It was a rehearsal for the possibly hard times to come. Then he retrieved a Brooklyn Lager from the fridge. It was his day off and the sun was over the yardarm.
He lived on the fourth floor of a brownstone in Yorkville, in New York's East Eighties. The apartment was
