'Yes. You know the rules prohibiting this?'
'Of course.'
'And you are willing to risk helping me?'
'That question does not need asking.'
Like almost everything else at the Whitestone Center for African Health, the security force was hired and supervised by Elizabeth St. Pierre. Now, although she and Anson were still as close as ever, there were times when she was forced to remind him that according to the pact he had made, it was the Whitestone Foundation that paid the bills, and the Whitestone Foundation that made the rules.
St. Pierre had brought Francis Ngale on board, but she was unaware that Anson had once saved the man's father from a nearly fatal episode of meningitis. Of all the security guards, Ngale was the only one Anson could completely trust.
After a brief stop in his apartment to shower and change into a fresh set of scrubs, Anson met Ngale back in the corridor. The first blush of dawn had begun to dispel the dense night. Side by side, the two men crossed the vestibule and proceeded toward the cinderblock room containing two vaults — both set in four feet of concrete. The timing was as good as it could be. The security man assigned to the banks of video monitors would be half-asleep and easily distracted. Anson checked his watch.
'Five-oh-two,' he said.
'Five-oh-two,' Ngale agreed.
'I will need three minutes. No more. Begin at five-oh-seven.'
'Three minutes. I will get you that. My friend, Joseph Djemba, is on watch. He loves nothing more than talking Cameroon Indominable Lions football.'
'The team is very good again, yes?'
'They must play to their potential, Doctor.'
'As must we, Francis,' Anson whispered, pointing at his watch and motioning Ngale down the hall to the security office. 'As must we.'
Access to the vault room was by keypad. The combination to the vault on the right, containing Anson's notebooks and other research materials, was known only to him and an attorney in Yaounde. In the event of his sudden death, the contents of the vault would be turned over to St. Pierre along with the information to break the code in which they were written.
The other vault — the one to the left — was refrigerated, and contained vials of Sarah-9, each carefully labeled, numbered, and catalogued. It seemed bizarre that he was forced to steal a drug that he had developed, but the process of synthesizing it from viral packets and yeast was complicated and extremely slow, and until Whitestone was allowed by him to develop mass production, it would always be in preciously short supply.
Anson stayed back just inside the entryway until exactly five-oh-seven, then approached the vault. Just thirty feet away, in the security office, was a bank of twenty-four monitors — three rows of eight. Hopefully, at that moment, Francis was seeing to it that Joseph Djemba was looking somewhere other than at the screens.
Anson fished a folded piece of paper from his pocket, knelt by the safe, and whispered the combination as he dialed. He exhaled audibly when the tumblers clicked into place and the heavy door swung open. Through a waft of cold air, he could see that there were eight vials of medication — the product of two or three days of laboratory work. Each vial, sealed with a rubber stopper, contained enough Sarah-9 for a week of intravenous treatment. In many instances, though, positive results were apparent in as little as two or three days. Hopefully, he would be able to keep his patient alive that long.
As he slipped one of the chilly vials into his shirt pocket, Anson wondered how closely Elizabeth kept count. Knowing the woman as he did, it was doubtful the missing vial would go unnoticed. Deny, deny, deny. That would have to be his strategy. If he was firm enough, Elizabeth would at least have to consider the possibility she had miscounted. With a minute to spare, he silently closed the vault door and returned to the corridor. A few seconds later, Francis left the security office and joined him.
'You are safe, Doctor,' he said.
'At least for the moment.'
'The security video is a loop that erases itself every twenty-four hours. If you can keep Dr. St. Pierre at bay for that length of time, the proof you were inside the safe will be gone.'
Anson returned to the hospital, his breathing much easier than when he left. Whether it was changes in blood flow to his damaged lungs, mucous plugs, or a bronchial spasm, it was unfathomable even now how much better he could feel from one hour to the next — or sometimes even from one minute. He used the increasingly rare periods of minimal symptoms to convince himself that there was still time — plenty of time — before drastic measures would be called for.
Marielle was as Anson had left her, although her spiking temperature was, for the moment at least, down to near normal. She could respond to a loud voice, or to being moved about in bed, but otherwise remained almost motionless. Her mother, from a village on the river to the north of the hospital, had lost two of her three children to the fallout from malnutrition. Hospital social workers had been doing all they could to prepare her for Marielle's return, but the one time Anson had met her, it was clear that although she was hoping for the girl's recovery, she was expecting the worst. It was five thirty when Anson slid the vial from his pocket, and drew up the first of ten doses, which he would administer over a week. If the child managed to survive, he might have to find a way to get a hold of another vial. The clinical trials were progressing so well that the optimum dose and administration schedule for several conditions had been worked out. Pinching off the child's IV, he slid the needle into one of the rubber ports and injected the bolus of Sarah-9. He was flushing the medication through with the IV fluid when he became aware of another presence in the four-bed ward. The instant of warning kept him from a major shock.
'How's she doing?' Elizabeth St. Pierre asked.
She was standing behind Anson and to his right. There was no way for him to be certain how long she had been there, but he gauged the angle to where he had held the vial of Sarah-9, and knew there was a possibility she could have seen.
'She's in bad shape,' he said.
'I suddenly went from deep sleep to being wide-awake, so I decided to drive out here and see how you were doing. Want me to take over so you can get some rest?'
St. Pierre, a native of Yaounde, had returned home after receiving her MD degree and training in London. She worked with Anson and his team for two years in the hospital and in the lab, and then brokered the agreement with Whitestone to exchange the rights to Sarah-9 for their unrestricted support of the Center for African Health.
Through the dim light, St. Pierre studied Anson with undisguised concern. She was a full-figured woman in her early forties, with aquiline features and smooth, ebony skin. Her tortoiseshell glasses always seemed too wide for her face, but somehow managed to underscore the sharp intelligence in her eyes. She was fluent in half a dozen languages in addition to several tribal dialects of her homeland.
'I have a full day scheduled in the clinic,' he said, searching for some hint of whether she knew what he had just done, 'but perhaps I could sleep for a couple of hours before then.'
Considering the years of their association, Anson knew surprisingly little of the woman's personal life, other than that she had been married briefly to a businessman in Yaounde, and still had a home on a hill overlooking the city. He also knew that she was a dedicated, incredibly well-read physician, certified in renal diseases, and an acknowledged expert in the medical aspects of kidney transplantation.
'Joseph, do you wish to tell me what is going on?' she asked, switching from French to English.
Anson froze.
'Pardon?'
'Earlier this morning. Claudine tells me you had quite a difficult time of it for a while.'
Anson's jaws unclenched. He swept his hand across the pocket of his scrub shirt to ensure the vial was not obvious.
'I have a little bronchitis,' he said.
'Nonsense, Joseph. This is the natural progression of pulmonary fibrosis, and you know that as well as I do.'
Anson became aware of some renewed tightness in his chest — just what was not needed. He gripped the seat of his chair and willed himself to breathe slowly. St. Pierre was a sharp clinician. It wouldn't take too long for her to discern that he was in trouble once more.
