It was important, after all, to get those little things right.
“Luciana, you are looking very chipper this morning,” he said, rolling toward her. “How is my favorite receptionist and nurse in training?”
“Big test tonight,” she told him.
“Better hit the books.”
“I am.” She raised the textbook from behind the counter. Building 5123 was a special facility at the hospital complex, with the highest level of security possible — so high, in fact, that even Zen had to submit to a rudimentary pat down. His aide — Jason Black — couldn’t even go downstairs with him.
Which, in some ways, was just as well.
While the staff members were all medical professionals, they worked for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, a special branch charged with investigating biology and medicine and their implications on the battlefield as well as society.
“Jay brought you coffee,” said Zen, glancing back at his aide. Black handed over the cup of Starbucks.
“You look like you’re still asleep, Jason,” said Luciana.
Jason blushed. “Naw.”
“I ride him hard, Lucy,” said Zen. “Twenty-four/seven, around the clock. How’s my patient?”
“They don’t tell me anything, Senator. But I haven’t heard anything bad.”
“That’s good to know.”
Zen rolled himself toward the security checkpoint a short distance away. Contrary to what she’d told Zen, the staff downstairs would have passed the word if there was a problem. Not that it would have kept Zen from going down to see their patient, Mark Stoner.
Stoner had been a close friend years before. They’d worked together at Dreamland; at one point, Stoner had saved Zen’s wife Breanna’s life.
Stoner had been lost on a mission in Eastern Europe some fifteen years before. Everyone, Zen included, had given him up for dead.
A recent Whiplash mission had discovered him still alive, though so physically and mentally altered, he was barely recognizable. Zen had helped rescue him. Now he felt obligated to help him back to health.
Mental health. Physically, he’d never be what he was. He’d always be much, much better.
Rescued from a helicopter crash by a scientist working with Olympic athletes, Stoner had been the recipient of numerous biomechanical improvements and a host of steroidlike drugs that had turned him into something approaching a Superman. While he had been weaned from most of the drugs the scientists had put him on, he still retained much of his strength.
A single nurse was on duty in the basement ward. Two guards with loaded shotguns stood behind her.
“Good morning, Senator.”
“Katherine.”
“Dr. Esrang is with him.”
“OK.”
Zen wheeled himself next to a chair, then waited as one of the guards ran a wand around him and looked over his wheelchair to make sure there were no weapons or other contraband. Cleared, he got back on and wheeled himself to the steel door. A loud buzzer sounded; the door slid to the side. Zen entered a narrow corridor and began wheeling toward a second steel door. The doors acted like an airlock; only one could be opened at a time, even in an emergency.
Two more guards waited on the other side of the door. Zen was searched once more. If anything, the second search was more thorough. Cleared, Zen went down the hallway to a set of iron bars. The burly man on the other side, dressed in riot gear but without a weapon, eyed him, then turned and nodded. The bars went up; Zen wheeled through. He said hello, not expecting an answer. He had never gotten one in the weeks since he’d been coming to visit Stoner, and he didn’t get one now.
Past the last set of iron bars, the place looked pretty much like a normal hospital suite again. It was only when one looked very closely at things, like the double locks on the cabinet drawers and the ubiquitous video monitors, that one might realize this was an ultra-high-security facility.
The hall turned to the right, opening into a large, glass-enclosed area. The glass looked into four different rooms. Zen pivoted to his left, facing a large physical therapy space on the other side of the glass. Stoner, dressed in sweats, was lying on a bench doing flying presses with a set of dumbbells. If the numbers on the sides of the plates were to be believed, he was swinging two hundred pounds overhead with each arm as easily as Zen might have lifted fifty.
Zen caught a reflection in the glass. Dr. Esrang was leaning, arms folded, against the glass almost directly behind him.
“You’re trusting him with free weights,” said Zen.
“He’s making good progress,” said Esrang, coming over. “He’s earning our trust.”
“Are the new drugs working?”
“Hard to say, as usual. We look at brain waves, we look at scans. We are only guessing.”
Zen nodded. They’d had variations of this conversation several times.
“You may go in if you wish,” said the doctor.
Zen watched his old friend awhile longer. Stoner’s face was expressionless. He might be concentrating entirely on his body’s movements, feeling every strain and pull of his muscles. Or he might be a million miles away.
Zen wheeled over to the far side of the space. There was a bar on the frame. He slid it up, then pushed the door-sized pane of glass next to it open. He made sure to close the door behind him, then wheeled around to the room where Stoner was working out.
Stoner said nothing when he entered. Zen wheeled about halfway into the room, waiting until his friend finished a set. Stoner, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, weighed about 240 pounds, nearly all of it muscle.
“Working with the dumbbells today?” said Zen.
Stoner got up from the bench and went to a weight rack on the far side of the room. He took out another set of dumbbells and began doing a military press.
“Enough weight for you?” asked Zen.
He hated that he was reduced to ridiculous comments, but he couldn’t think of much else to say. Stoner worked in silence, pushing the weights up with steady, flawless efficiency. These were the heaviest set of weights in the room, and he knocked off thirty reps without a problem. He was sweating, but that might have been due to the heat — the place felt like a sauna.
“I can stay for breakfast if you want,” said Zen. “Give me an excuse to blow off a committee meeting.”
No answer. Stoner put down the weights, then went back to the bench and started on a set of sitting curls. His face remained the same: no sign of stress.
“Nationals are doing well. They won last night,” said Zen. “They’ll be back home soon. Maybe we can take in a game.”
“Baseball?” asked Stoner.
“Yeah. You want to go to a game?”
Instead of responding, Stoner went back to his workout. During his treatment in Eastern Europe, he had been essentially brainwashed, his personality and memory replaced with an almost robotic consciousness. His old self or at least some semblance of it remained, but exactly how much, no one could say.
Zen had managed only a handful of conversations with him since he’d been here. Stoner hadn’t said more than a dozen words in each. But that was more than he’d said to anyone else.
Stoner did two more circuits, pumping the iron without visible fatigue. As he finished a set of standing presses, he glanced over at Zen.
The look in his eye frightened Zen. For a split second he thought Stoner was going to toss one of the dumbbells at his head.
He didn’t. He just glared at him, then pumped through another twenty reps.
“Man, you’re in good shape,” said Zen as Stoner racked the weights.
Stoner turned to him. “Need heavier weights. Too easy.”
“Did you ask the doctors?”
