Syndrome

Then Sandra Hanes, the lively, dark-haired woman in charge of the second floor for this shift, walked into the examination room. She knew nothing about Kristen.

'Perfect timing,' he said. Then he drew her aside. 'Keep an eye on Emma, will you? Try and keep her in her room and quiet as much as you can. The last blood work showed her white-cell count over twelve K/CMM. It could mean there's some minimal rejection rearing its head. Probably nothing to worry about, but can you just keep her away from the stairs for godsake? I don't want her tiring herself out.'

'I'll tie her to the bed if I have to,' Sandra answered. The clinical trials had required a mountain of paperwork, and her face was strained from working long shifts, including a lot of weekends, like this one. But he suspected she actually appreciated the overtime. She was forty-five, divorced and putting a straight-A daughter through Rutgers.

She also was a first-rate nurse, like all the others at the institute, and her loyalty couldn't be more secure. Still, he knew that she and all the other staffers were bursting to tell the world about the miracles they'd witnessed. That was why Bartlett had insisted on an ironclad nondisclosure agreement in the contract of every employee to be strictly enforced. (And to put teeth into the security, all employees were body-searched for documents or cameras or tapes on the way in and out.) To violate it would be to open yourself to a life-altering lawsuit. During World War II the claim had been that 'loose lips sink ships.' Here they would render you a pauper for life. Nobody dared even whisper about the spectacular success of the clinical trials.

As the examining room emptied out, he checked his watch one more time. Winston Bartlett was due any minute now and he had nothing but bad news for the man.

Trying to control his distress, he walked to the end of the hallway and prepared to enter the lab. Whereas the ground floor and the two above were for reception, common dining, and individual rooms, the basement contained the laboratory, his private office, the examination rooms, and an OR (never yet used, thankfully). There also was a sub-basement, accessible only through an elevator in the lab or an alarmed set of fire stairs. It was an intensive- care area, and it was where Kristen, the Beta casualty, was being kept.

He zipped a magnetic card through the reader on the door and entered the air lock. The lab was maintained under positive pressure to keep out the slightest hint of any kind of contaminant. It was as sterile as a silicon chip factory.

The room was dominated by a string of black slate workbenches, then rows and rows of metal shelves with tissue- containing vials of a highly volatile solvent cocktail he had engineered especially for this project, along with a computer network and a huge autoclave and several electron microscopes.

He walked in and greeted his research team. He'd managed to keep the core group that had been closest to him at Stanford, four people who, he believed, were among the finest medical minds in the country. They were the renowned molecular biologist David Hopkins, Ph.D., the strikingly beautiful and widely published endocrinologist Debra Connolly, M.D., and two younger staffers, a couple who'd met and married at his Stanford lab, Ed and Beth Sparks, both Ph.D.'s who'd done their post-doc under him. They all were here now in the wilds of northern New Jersey because they knew they were making medical history.

David was waiting, his long shaggy forelock down over his brow as always. But his eyes told it all.

'Karl, Bartlett's blood work from yesterday just got faxed up from the lab at Princeton. His enzyme level has increased another three point seven percent.'

'Damn.' It was happening for sure. 'Did you run-'

'The computer simulation? A one-standard-deviation estimate is that he's going to go critical sometime between seventeen and nineteen days.'

'The Syndrome.' Van de Vliet sighed.

'Just like Kristen.'

'She faked us out. There were no side effects for weeks.' Van de Vliet shook his head sadly as he set his handheld Palm computer onto a side table. Later he would transfer all the day’s patient data into the laboratory's server, the Hewlett- Packard they all affectionately called the Mothership. Then he began taking off his white coat.

'Bartlett looks to be inevitable now.' David exhaled in impotent despair. The frustration and the tension were getting to everybody. They all knew what was at stake. 'It's in two and a half weeks, give or take.'

What had supposedly been a cosmetic procedure had gone horribly awry. Van de Vliet wondered if it wasn't the ultimate vengeance of the quest for something you shouldn't have.

'His AB blood type is so rare. If we'd just kept a sample before the procedure, we'd have something to work with now,' Van de Vliet said sadly. 'We still might be able to culture some antibodies.'

He hadn't told his research team yet about the other possible option-using somebody else as an AB blood- type incubator.

His last-ditch idea was to find a patient with a blood type of AB positive and introduce a small quantity of the special Beta telomerase enzyme into them. The theory was that this might induce their body to produce compatible antibodies, which could then be extracted and cultured in the laboratory. If a sufficient quantity could be produced they could be injected into Bartlett and hopefully arrest the enzyme's pattern of entering the host's bloodstream and metastasizing into the more complex form that brought on the Syndrome. And if it did work, then there might even be some way to adapt the procedure to Kristen.

'Karl, if Cambridge Pharmaceuticals finds out about the Beta fiasco, how's it going to affect-'

'How do youthinkit's going to affect the sale? If this gets out, there'll be no sale. To anybody. Bartlett will be ruined, and Gerex along with him. That's everybody here, in case you're counting.' He turned and exited the lab, pushing pensively through the air lock, and then he walked slowly toward his office, collecting his thoughts. He was just passing the elevator when it opened.

Sunday, April 5

8:47a.m.

Winston Bartlett looked up to see Van de Vliet as he stepped off the elevator, and the sight heartened him as always. The Dutchman was a genius. If anyone could solve this damned mess, surely he was the one.

'First thing, Karl, how is she now?'

'I think you'd better go down and see for yourself,' Van de Vliet said slowly. 'As I told you on the phone, she still comes and goes. I think it's getting worse.'

Bartlett felt a chill run through him. He had once cared for this woman as much as he was capable of caring for anybody, and what had happened was a damned shame. All he had intended was to give her something special, something no man had ever given a woman before.

'Will she know who I am? She still did yesterday.'

'It depends,' Van de Vliet replied. 'Yesterday afternoon she was fully lucid, but then earlier this morning I got the impression she thinks she's in a different place and time. If I had to guess, I'd say she's regressing chronologically. I suppose that's logical, though nothing about this makes any sense.'

Bartlett was following him back through the air lock and into the laboratory. The intensive-care area below was reachable only by a special elevator at the rear of the lab.

All these once-cocky people, Bartlett thought, were now scared to death. Van de Vliet and his research team might actually be criminally liable if the right prosecutor got hold of the case. At the very least they'd be facing an ethics fiasco.

But I'm the one who's about to be destroyed. In every sense.

It had all started when Karl Van de Vliet confided in him that there was an adjunct procedure arising out of stem cell research that might, might, offer the possibility of a radical new cosmetic breakthrough. Just a possibility. He called it the Beta, since it was highly experimental. He also wasn't sure it was reproducible. But he had inadvertently discovered it while testing the telomerase enzyme on his own skin over a decade ago.

At the time he was experimenting with topical treatments for pigment abnormalities, but the particular telomerase enzyme he was working with had had the unexpected effect of changing the texture of his skin, softening it and removing wrinkles, a change that subsequently seemed permanent.

The idea had lain dormant while they were preparing for the clinical trials. But then Bartlett'spetite amie, the cable TV personality Kristen Starr, had had a career crisis that she blamed on aging, and he came up with the idea of having her undergo the skin procedure.