“Neither is your stonewalling, Morris.”
The teeth in her words surprised even her. Morris had been her favorite professor and thesis adviser. Moreover, she looked up to him as a father figure, someone she could confide in. When her mother had died two years ago, it was Morris who gave her comfort, who helped make funeral arrangements. “I was flattered when you asked me on. Privileged to be working on a great cutting-edge project. But you used these people, Morris. You suspended them and dropped them off on some park bench. No follow-ups. No checking for bad side effects. You used them like lab rats.”
“These people were homeless,” he said, stabbing his finger on the article and squinting at her in a pretense of outrage. “You know as well as I do that all our volunteers are college students and closely monitored during and after.”
“Now they are. Before that you bought people off the street—people no one would miss.”
He couldn’t hold her gaze and dropped his eyes to the clippings. “They could have gotten the drug anywhere—another lab, the black market, whatever. So don’t come accusing me of unethical practices before you know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“It says that scientists paid them to take sleep tests. That’s the same pitch you put up on student bulletin boards all over town. And I checked with the state health agencies—no other research institution has used tetrodotoxin for years. Only Proteus.”
“I’ve heard enough from you.” He stood up. “This conversation’s over.”
“You don’t even care, do you? Two committed suicide, another had his friend bash his head in. And who knows how many others. They were plagued with horrible visions, and you people didn’t care.”
“Sarah, this has turned into an interrogation, and I resent it.”
“Would you prefer the police?”
His eye spasmed. “Is that a threat?”
“What you people did is criminal.”
“You have no proof and no right accusing me. Now get the hell out of here.”
She could hardly believe that he was the same man she had adored—a man of high-minded ideals, a man who had seemingly dedicated his science to raising the quality of life, who had taken the Hippocratic Oath. Suddenly he was a cowardly, pathetic old man denying he was a murderer. Before she left, she removed a wide folder from her briefcase and dropped it before him.
“What’s this?”
“One of your skeletons.”
He didn’t touch it. “I said to get out of here.”
She flipped open the folder to reveal downloaded neuroelectrical images taken from the lab archives. “Look familiar?” she asked.
He glanced at the imaged configuration and the name in bold on the sticker.
“You used him, too,” she said. Then she turned on her heel toward the door. “Maybe you’re right after all: There is no God, only man.”
67
George Megrichian loved surf casting. He had been doing it most of his fifty-six years.
He had fished everywhere, but this was his favorite spot because no one was around and because the sand was shoring up. In fact, this beach was the only one on the Massachusetts Bay that was growing in volume, because the lower Cape was eroding and sending all its sand to this sandbar. Twenty years ago, the beach was segmented every hundred yards by stone breakwaters that stood so high in high tide that kids would jump off the ends into deep water. Now, not a single granite boulder was visible in the five-mile stretch. Two decades and millions of tons of sand had been washed onto the shoreline, pushing the sandbar maybe a full quarter mile into the surf. He joked that were he to live another thousand years, he’d be able to walk to Portugal.
Because it was a private beach, you’d never find more than twenty people on the stretch of sand, even this week of the Fourth of July. Of course, more than a mile to the east was Scusset Beach, which was public and packed on summer weekends. But not here. And no matter which way you looked, not another soul was in sight.
The tide was in and the sun had just broken the bank of clouds hanging over the horizon.
He cast his line into the gentle surf and stuck the grip end of the pole into the holder buried in the sand. Then he sat in his folding chair with a mug of coffee and stretched his bare legs to take in the rays of the morning sun. Out at sea, sailboats cut across the horizon, their jibs bellying against the wind and glowing against the azure blue.
Suddenly something moved out of the corner of his eye. He looked to the right. It was just above the storm line, where a continuous brow of seaweed had been pushed back during winter storms, now sun-dried to black.
His first thought was that it was a trick of the rising sun. But the surface of the sand seemed to be moving. Crabs. Except crabs didn’t live in high, dry sand, only the wet stuff.
As he sat up to see better, a hand pushed its way into the air.
“Jesus Christ!” George cried. He scrambled out of his chair, knocking his mug over. A moment later, a second hand pushed its way out. Then arms. Suddenly the top half of a man rose out of the sand, rubbing his face and spitting sand.
For several seconds, George was too frozen with horror to move—too stunned by what his eyes were registering. The man rolled to his side to free his legs, then pushed himself onto all fours, drooling sand and gulping in air. He was wearing shorts, but no top or shoes. George gasped as he watched.
The hole was maybe two feet deep—far too deep for the sand to have covered him naturally, like if he got drunk the night before. He had been buried.
The guy struggled to push himself to his feet, wavering and spitting and looking like one of those movie zombies. At one point, he clamped his hand to his side and groaned as he nearly doubled over. Then he checked his hand as if looking for blood.
Then before George knew it, the guy began to stumble toward him. George yelped and grabbed his pole to defend himself, gripping it like a baseball bat. But the guy shuffled by him down the beach, rubbing his face and hands, moving at a weird angle as if he had a stitch in his left side.
He headed toward the wooden set of stairs that led up to the top of the Manomet cliffs. He said nothing, nor did he look back, just climbed the steps one by one to the top, where he disappeared, leaving George wondering how he would explain this to his wife.
68
“They were all premonitions,” Zack said. “I kept seeing myself being buried alive.”
Sarah looked at him. “But how could you see something in the future? That’s impossible.”
“I don’t know how. I don’t understand any of this, except the bastards flatlined me, then dumped me in a hole on that beach.”
It was nearly noon, and he had stumbled up to the White Cliffs complex of condos and golf course. In his print boxer shorts, he looked as if he had just come up from sunbathing. At the top, he found a greenskeeper and asked if he had a cell phone he could borrow. Two hours later, Sarah picked him up on Route 3A.
His brain still felt fuzzy and slow, and his side ached, although there was no wound or bruise. “What about Stern?”
“He denied everything. He just stood there and lied point-blank. I still can’t believe it.”
“Because it’s the truth and he’s scared shitless.”
“But he wasn’t at the lab last night, was he?”
“I didn’t see him. Just Luria and Gladstone’s choirboys. But he may know they came after me. He no doubt
