want.'
Then a door opens and she floats through it and out. Then comes the clanking of a door that reminds her of the steel air lock she'd gone through last night looking for Kristen. The smells. She's in the laboratory.
'We can take her from here,' comes a voice, drifting through her reverie.
She fantasizes it's Karl Van de Vliet. Or maybe he really is there. In her dream state it's hard to know. But he isn't alone.
'You said you'd make one more attempt to create the antibodies. Is. . '
'I said I would do all I could, W.B. The first attempt. . you know what happened. I got almost no results, but I gave you an injection of all I managed to garner. Today I spent the day doing simulations. We're working closer to the edge than I thought. That's why I needed her down at the lab tonight. I want to run some more tests and then try to make a decision. Tonight. There's just a hell of a lot more risk than I first thought.'
The voice trails off and Ally finds herself trying to comprehend 'risk.'
She hears 'beta' again and it floats through her mind, but now its meaning is unclear. It's something she'd heard but can no longer place.
'Ally,' comes a ghostly voice. Surely this is a dream, and she recognizes it as her father, Arthur. Now she can see him. He's wearing a white cap and they're boating in Central Park. He shows up in her dreams a lot and she feels he's the messenger of her unconscious, telling her truths that she sometimes doesn't want to hear.
'Ally,' he says, 'he's going to perform the full Beta procedure on you. He didn't tell you, but you know it's true. He thinks he's finally calculated everything right. Can't you see? Is that what you want?'
She isn't sure what she wants. And right now she isn't entirely clear where she fits on the scale of sleeping/waking. It is so bizarre. The two parts of her mind, the conscious and the unconscious, are talking to each other. Her unconscious is warning her about fears she didn't even know she had. Or at least she hadn't admitted to yet.
Then she hears Winston Bartlett's voice again.
'Karl, we can't save Kristen now. I've finally realized that. She's gone too far. It's just a tragedy we'll have to figure out how to live with.'
'The body is a complex chemical laboratory that sometimes gets out of balance. There's always hope. I think-'
'Know what
What Ally wants to do, more than anything else, is to make sense of what her options are. The most obvious one- in fact, maybe the only one-is to flow along with that infinite river she feels around her, just to lie where she is, in this sedative-induced reverie, and let her body be taken over by Karl Van de Vliet. Perhaps he has marvelous things in store for her. Except she has no idea what's real and what is imaginary.
'The simulations are giving me some idea of what went wrong with the Beta before.' The voice is Van de Vliet's. 'I have one more test to run, but if I handled this the way the simulation now suggests, I think I could actually generate the telomerase antibodies we need and get the Beta to finally work, avoiding the Syndrome. But to prove it would require a full-scale experiment. I'm reluctant to do that without Alexa's permission.'
'Christ, Karl, are you getting cold feet? This is a hell of a time for that.'
'Call it a pang of rationality.'
'But everything is at stake.'
'I don't know what's eventually going to happen with the Syndrome, but it's criminal to jeopardize any more lives.' Van de Vliet sighs. 'Look, you had the procedure of your own free will, and you knew the risks. Alexa Hampton didn't volunteer for the Beta. She's not a lab rat. At the very least, we ought to get her to sign a release. The liability is. . In any case, I'm not doing anything till I run this last test. Then maybe I'll have some idea exactly how much risk is involved.'
'And then, by God we're going to do it. Tonight. This is it.'
She feels a cold metal object insinuate itself against her chest. Time rushes around her, sending her forward on a journey that seems increasingly inevitable. Where it's taking her, she has no idea, but she senses she no longer has an option of whether she wants to go or not.
Now her dreamscape has become crowded as Grant drifts in once more. He seems to be wearing a white lab coat like the others. He settles beside her and takes her hand
'Ally, it's going to be okay. I'm going to be here for you.'
Grant,
She wants to talk to him, but the words aren't working. Why is this happening?
Chapter 33
Ellen O'Hara had not left after the day shift ended at sixp.m. Instead, she had told Dr. Van de Vliet that she wanted to reorganize some of the NIH paper files she kept in her office on the first floor. The truth was, she had become convinced that the culmination of something deeply evil was scheduled for later that night.
The evil had begun when Kristen Starr's mother arrived looking for her and declaring that she'd been kidnapped. Then after Dr. Vee categorically denied he knew anything about her (a blatant lie), Kristen was brought back to the institute from wherever she'd been moved to, and she was visibly changed. She was whisked down to the subbasement the moment she arrived and immediately sealed off in intensive care, but it was clear she had no idea who she was or where she was. Something horrible had happened to her. And maybe it was imagination, but she no longer even looked like a grown woman.
Then this morning, Bartlett and his Japanese bodyguard brought in the young man who had accompanied Alexa Hampton, but he wasn't put through the admissions formalities. Instead he was taken directly downstairs.
May at the front desk said she thought he was a newspaper reporter she’d met once when they were on a public-health panel together. That was when Ellen realized he was Stone Aimes, that feisty medical columnist for the
Now Stone Aimes might be able to save Alexa Hampton.
Dr. Van de Vliet and Debra had carried out a special stem-cell procedure for her aortic stenosis, the first that they had attempted for that particular condition. The results, as shown by her file, were nothing short of astonishing. She’d begun responding in a matter of hours.
She should be in a room upstairs, so why was she still down in the subbasement?
Now Ellen O'Hara knew the reason.
She had seen in the file that they were going to perform the Beta procedure on Alexa Hampton. When they'd performed it on Kristen Starr, the result was a horrific side effect. And now they were going to do it again. Tonight.
The criminality that started with Kristen Starr and Katherine Starr was going to be compounded. She was about to become part of a criminal conspiracy. She had to put a stop to it.
She was nervous about confronting Van de Vliet, but she didn't know what she could say that wouldn't sound like an indictment. Still, she was damned well determined to do it.
If nothing else, it would provide a diversion.
She put away the files and walked out into the dim hallway, then made her way into the reception area.
'Everything all right, Grace?' she asked the nurse at the desk.
'My, you're working late,' came the pleasant reply. 'Quiet as a mouse around here. I guess it'll be even
