A Brain

by Robin Cook

  Martin woke with the sun almost overhead. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching him. There were lots of people in the park now, but no one seemed to be paying any attention to him. It had gotten warm and he was sweating heavily. When he stood up he was aware of his heavy ripe smell. Walking out of the park he glanced at his watch and was shocked to learn it was ten-thirty.

  He found a Greek coffee house several blocks away. Balling up the old coat, he put it under the table. He was famished and he ordered eggs, home fries, bacon, toast and coffee. He used the tiny men’s room but decided not to clean up. No one seeing him would ever guess he was a doctor. If he were being sought he couldn’t have a better disguise.

  As he finished his coffee he found the crumpled list he’d made of the five patients: Marino, Lucas, Collins, McCarthy, and Lindquist. Was it possible that these patients and their histories were related to the bizarre fact that he was being pursued by the authorities? But even so, why would they be trying to kill him; and what had happened to these women? Had they been murdered? Could the affair be somehow related to sex and the underworld? If so, how did radiation fit in? And why was the FBI involved? Maybe the conspiracy was national, affecting hospitals all across the country.

  Getting more coffee, Martin was certain the answer to the puzzle lay in the Hobson University Medical Center, but he knew that was the one place the authorities would expect him to go. In other words, the hospital was the most dangerous place for Martin, yet the only place where he had a chance to figure out what was happening. Leaving his coffee, Philips went back to use the pay phone. His first call was to Helen.

  “Doctor Philips! I’m so glad you called. Where are you?” Her voice was strained.

  “I’m outside the hospital.”

  “I guessed that. But where?”

  “Why?” asked Martin.

  “Just wanted to know,” said Helen.

  “Tell me,” said Martin. “Has anybody been looking for me . . . like . . . the FBI?”

  “Why would the FBI be looking for you?”

  Martin was now reasonably certain that Helen was under observation. It was not like her to answer a question with a question, especially an absurd one about the FBI. Under normal circumstances she would have simply told Martin he was crazy. Sansone or one of his agents had to be there with her. Philips hung up abruptly. He would have to think of another way to get the charts and other information he wanted from his office.

  Martin next called the hospital and had Dr. Denise Sanger paged. The last thing he wanted was for her to go to the GYN clinic. But she did not pick up her page and Martin was afraid to leave a message. Hanging up, he placed a final call to Kristin Lindquist. Kristin’s roommate picked up on the first ring, but when Philips introduced himself and asked about Kristin the girl said she could not give him any information and that she’d prefer he didn’t call. Then she hung up.

  Back at his table, Philips spread the list of patients in front of him. Taking out a pen he wrote: “strong radioactivity in the brains of young women (? other areas); Pap smears reported abnormal when they were normal; and neurological symptoms something like multiple sclerosis.” Philips stared at what he’d written, his mind racing in crazy circles. Then he wrote: “Neurological—GYN—police—FBI,” followed by “Werner necrophilia.” There didn’t seem to be any possible way all these things could be related, but it did seem as if GYN was in the middle. If he could find out why those Pap smears were reported abnormal, maybe he’d have something.

  Suddenly a wave of desperation swept over him. It was obvious he was up against something bigger than he could possibly handle. His old world with the daily headaches no longer seemed so terrible. He would gladly put up with a little boring routine if he could go to bed at night with Denise in his arms. He wasn’t a religious person, but he found himself trying to strike a bargain with God: if He would rescue him from this nightmare, Martin would never complain about his life again.

  He looked down at the paper and realized that his eyes had filled with tears. Why would the police be after him, of all people? It didn’t make sense.

  He went back to the phone and tried again to reach Denise, but she wasn’t answering her page. In desperation he called the GYN clinic and spoke to the receptionist.

  “Has Denise Sanger had her appointment yet?”

  “Not yet,” said the receptionist. “We expect her any minute.”

  Martin thought quickly before he spoke. “This is Doctor Philips. When she arrives tell her that I canceled the appointment and that she should see me.”

  “I’ll tell her,” said the receptionist and Martin sensed she was genuinely bewildered.

  Martin walked back to the small park and sat down. He found himself incapable of any sensible decision. For a man who believed in order and authority, not to be able to contact the police after being shot at seemed the height of irrationality.

  The afternoon passed in fitful sleep and wakeful confusion. His lack of decision became a decision in itself. Rush hour started and reached its crescendo. Then the crowds began to dissipate and Martin went back to the coffee shop for dinner. It was a little after six.

  He ordered a meatloaf plate and tried paging Denise while it was being prepared. Still she didn’t pick up. When he was through he decided to try her apartment, wondering if the police knew enough about him to stake her out.

  She picked up the phone on the first ring.

  “Martin?” her voice was desperate.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Thank God! Where are you?”

  Martin ignored the question and said, “Where have you been? I’ve been paging you all day.”

  “I haven’t been feeling well. I stayed at home.”

  “You didn’t let the page operator at the hospital know.”

  “I know I . . .” suddenly Sanger’s voice changed. “Don’t come . . .” she yelled.

  Her voice was choked off and Philips could hear a muffled struggle. His heart jumped in his throat. “Denise!” he shouted. Everyone in the coffee shop froze; all heads turned in Philips’ direction.

  “Philips, this is Sansone.” The agent had picked up the phone. Martin could still hear Denise trying to shout in the background. “Just a minute, Philips,” said Sansone. Then turning away from the phone he said, “Get her out of here and keep her quiet.” Coming back on the line Sansone said, “Listen, Philips . . .”

  “What the hell is going on, Sansone,” cried Philips. “What are you doing to Denise?”

  “Calm down, Philips. The girl is fine. We’re here to protect her. What happened to you last night at the Cloisters?”

  “What happened to me? Are you crazy? You people wanted to blow me away.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Philips. We knew it wasn’t you in the courtyard. We thought they’d already caught you.”

  “Who’s they?” asked the bewildered Philips.

  “Philips! I can’t talk about these things over the phone.”

  “Just tell me what the fuck’s going on!”

  The people in the coffee shop were still motionless. They were New Yorkers and accustomed to all sorts of strange happenings, but not in their local coffee shop.

  Sansone was cool and detached. “Sorry, Philips. You have to come here, and you have to come now. Being out on your own you are simply complicating our problem. And you already know there are a number of innocent lives at stake.”

  “Two hours,” yelled Philips. “I’m two hours away from the city.”

  “All right, two hours, but not a second longer.”

  There was a final click and the line was dead.

  Philips panicked. In one second his indecision was swept away. He threw down a five-dollar bill and ran out on the street toward the Eighth Avenue subway.

  He was going to the Medical Center. He didn’t know what he was going to do once he got there but he was going to the hospital. He had two hours and he had to have some answers. There was a chance Sansone was telling t
he truth. Maybe they did think that he’d been taken by some unknown force. But Philips wasn’t sure and the uncertainty terrified him. His intuition told him that Denise was now in jeopardy.

  The uptown train had standing-room only, even though the rush hour peak was over, but the ride was good for Philips. It tempered his panic and allowed him time to use his essential intelligence. By the time he got off he knew how he was going to get inside the medical center and what he was going to do when he did.

  Martin followed the crowd off the train to the street, and headed for his first destination: a liquor store. The clerk took one look at Martin’s disheveled appearance, bounded from behind his register and tried to hustle Philips out. He relented when Martin held up his money.

  It took him just thirty seconds to pick out and pay for a pint of whiskey. Turning off Broadway onto a side street, Martin found a small alley filled with trash barrels. There he removed the top to the whiskey, took a good slug and gargled. He swallowed a small amount but spat most out onto the ground. Using the whiskey like cologne he anointed his face and neck, then slid the half-empty bottle back into his coat pocket. Stumbling past most of the trash barrels, Philips picked one toward the back. It was filled with sand probably used for the sidewalk in the winter. He dug a shallow hole and buried his wallet, putting the rest of his cash into the same pocket as the whiskey.

  His next stop was a small but busy grocery store. People gave him a wide berth as he entered. It was quite crowded and Philips had to push past some customers to find an area with a clear line of sight to the checkout registers.

  “Ahhh,” screamed Philips as he choked and stumbled to the floor taking a display of canned beans on special with him. He writhed as if in pain as the beans rolled in every direction. When a shopper bent down to ask if he was all right, Martin rasped, “Pain. My heart!”

  The ambulance arrived in moments. Martin had an oxygen mask strapped to his face and a rhythm EKG connected to his chest during the short drive to Hobson University Medical Center. His essentially normal EKG had already been preliminarily analyzed by radio and it had been determined that no cardiac drugs were needed.

  As the attendants pushed him into the ER Martin glimpsed several policemen standing on the platform, but they didn’t give him so much as a glance. He was carried down to one of the main ER rooms and transferred to a bed. One of the nurses searched his pockets for identification while the resident took another EKG. Since the tracing was normal, the cardiac team began to disperse, leaving the intern to take over.

  “How’s the pain, partner?” he asked, bending over Philips.

  “I need some Maalox,” Martin growled. “Sometimes when I drink cheap stuff I need Maalox.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said the doctor.

  Philips was given Maalox by a hardened thirty-five-year-old nurse who did everything but slap him for the pitiful shape he was in. She took a short history and Martin gave his name as Harvey Hopkins. It’d been his roommate in college. The nurse then said they’d give him a chance to relax for a few minutes to see if his chest pain came back. She pulled the curtain around his bed.

  Philips waited for several minutes, then he climbed off the end of the bed. On an ER cart against the wall he found a prep razor and a small bar of soap used to clean wounds. He also got several towels, and a surgical cap and mask. So armed he peeked out of the curtains.

  As usual at that time of night, the ER was a hopeless sea of confusion. The sign-in line at the front desk almost reached the entrance and ambulances were arriving at regular intervals. No one even looked at Martin as he walked down the central corridor and pushed open the gray door across from the besieged main desk. There was only one doctor in the lounge and he was engrossed in an EKG when Philips walked through to the showers.

  Rapidly he showered and shaved, leaving his clothes in the corner of the room. By the sinks he found a pile of surgical scrub gear, which was the favorite apparel of the emergency room staff. He put on a shirt and pants and the surgical hat to cover his wet head. He even tied on the mask. There were many times that hospital personnel used masks outside of the OR, especially when they were suffering from a head cold.

  Regarding himself in the mirror, Philips was convinced that someone would have to know him very well to recognize him. He’d not only gotten inside the hospital but he looked like he belonged. As for Harvey Hopkins, ER patients were always walking out, Philips looked at his watch. He’d used up an hour.

  Charging out of the lounge, Philips crossed the ER and ran past two more policemen. He used the back stairs behind the cafeteria to reach the second floor. He wanted a radiation detector, but decided it was too dangerous to fetch the one in his office and had to search around the radiotherapy section until he found another. Then he ran back down the stairs to the main floor and hurried into the clinics building.

  The elevators there were old and required operators, who had already left for the day, so Martin had to climb four flights to GYN. He had decided on the subway, sandwiched between two very unhappy businessmen, that the radiation could have been connected to GYN, but now that he had arrived, radiation detector in hand, his resolve began to falter. He had no idea what he was looking for.

  Passing the main GYN waiting room, Philips turned into the smaller university clinic. It had yet to be passed over by the cleaning crew, and the area was littered with overflowing ashtrays and papers. It all looked so innocent and normal in the meager light.

  Philips checked the receptionist’s desk but it was locked. Trying the two doors behind the desk he found the whole area to be secured. But the locks were simple ones, which required the key to be inserted in the doorknob itself. A plastic card from the top of the receptionist’s desk sufficed to open one. Martin went in, closed the door and turned on the lights.

  He was standing in the hallway where he’d talked with Dr. Harper. There were two examining rooms to the left and the lab or utility room to the right. Martin selected the examining rooms first. Monitoring the detector very carefully he went over each room, sticking the detector into every cabinet and recess and even going over the examining tables themselves. Nothing. The place was clean. In the lab areas he did the same thing starting with the countertop cabinets, opening drawers, peering into boxes. At the end of the room he went over the large instrument cabinets. It was all negative.

  The first response came from the wastebasket. It was a very weak reading and totally harmless, but it was nonetheless radiation. Glancing at his watch, Philips noticed that time was slipping rapidly away. In one-half-hour he was going to have to call Denise’s apartment. He decided that he’d present himself only after he’d made sure Sansone wasn’t holding her.

  With the positive reading in the wastebasket he decided to go over the lab one more time. He found nothing until he returned to the closet. The lower shelves were filled with linen and hospital gowns, while the upper shelves had a mixture of laboratory and office supplies. Below the shelves was a hamper filled with soiled linen, which registered another weak positive reading when he pushed the probe almost to the floor.

  Martin emptied out the soiled linen and went over it with the detector. Nothing. Sticking the probe into the emptied hamper Philips again got a weak response near the base. He reached down and put his hand into the enclosure. The walls and floor of the hamper were painted wood and seemed solid. With his fist he struck the bottom and felt a vibration. Taking his time he hit it all around the periphery. When he got to the far corner the board tilted slightly, then fell back into place. Pushing in the same location Martin raised the floor of the hamper and looked beneath. Below were two shielded lead storage boxes with the familiar radiation warning logo.

  The two boxes had labels indicating their origin from the Brookhaven Laboratories, which was a source of all sorts of medical isotopes. Only one of the labels was entirely legible. It contained 2-[18F]fluoro-2 deoxy-D-glucose. The other label was partially scraped off although it was also an isotope of deoxy-D-glucose
.

  Martin quickly opened the boxes. The first one with the legible label was moderately radioactive. It was the other box which had a significantly thicker lead shield that made the radiation detector go crazy. Whatever it was, it was very hot. Philips shut and sealed the container. Then he piled the linen back into the hamper and shut the door.

  Martin had never heard of either one of the compounds, but the mere fact they were in the GYN clinic was reason enough to make them highly suspect. The hospital had extremely strict controls concerning radioactive material that was used for radiotherapy, some diagnostic work and controlled research. But none of these categories was applicable to the GYN clinic. What Philips had to know was what radioactive deoxy-glucose was used for.

  Carrying the radiation detector, Philips descended the clinic stairs to the basement. Once in the tunnel system he had to slow his dash in order not to surprise the groups of medical students. But when he reached the new medical school he increased his pace, arriving at the library totally out of breath.

  “Deoxy-glucose,” he panted. “I need to look it up. Where?”

  “I don’t know,” said the startled librarian.

  “Shit,” said Philips and turned and started toward the card catalogue.

  “Try the reference desk,” called the woman.

  Reversing his direction, Philips went to the periodical section where the reference desk was staffed with a girl who looked about fifteen. She’d heard the commotion and was watching Martin’s approach.

  “Quick . . . .” said Philips. “Deoxy-glucose. Where can I look it up?”

  “What is it?” The girl eyed Martin with alarm.