Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  Alaine said, “Moving.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s crazy here. It’ll be crazy there, too, a little later in the day.”

  She wasn’t making sense. “What are you talking about?”

  “The best way to get to Kings Canyon is to go down to Gilroy, then west.” She paused. “Correct. Then head west on Fifty-six to the Five.”

  “Alaine, what—”

  I heard her say something in the background. Someone was talking to her.

  She said, back into the phone, “You have to make sure to check the farmland before you hit the reservoir in the Valley. It’s very interesting.”

  I started to understand what she was doing. I scrabbled for a piece of paper and a pen.

  She whispered, “Automatic gate, surveillance, thirteen miles from One-oh-one. Right side of the road.” In a louder voice, she said, “Take a lot of water—the park is hot this time of year. Uh-hunh. Be careful. And I want you to think of me when you’re there. Remember, I’m the one who suggested you go.” She paused, as if waiting for an answer. I understood I wasn’t to make one.

  Even so, I said, “Thanks, Alaine.”

  “Kings Canyon will be gorgeous this time of year. Remember I told you about that wonderful place. You owe me one.”

  She hung up the phone.

  For a moment, I sat with the phone in my lap, took a draft of the beer. Okay, McCormick, I thought, your old girlfriend is feeding you information. She’s telling you where to go. She’s also asking you for help.

  I drained the rest of the beer. Then, to save batteries on my cell, I called in to the voice mail system from Brooke’s phone. Two messages.

  The first was from Brooke, asking where I was, sounding a little worried. The second, I assumed, would be from Brooke as well. It was received ten minutes after her call, just after six a.m.

  A man’s voice came over the line. “Dr. McCormick, this is Otto Falk. I apologize for the early call, but I wanted to arrange a meeting with you before you returned to the East Coast. I do hope we can meet. Please call me nevertheless.” He left a telephone number.

  “Are you going to meet him?”

  “Of course.”

  Brooke let out a small breath into the phone. I could tell she was thinking. Finally, she said, “I’ll come.”

  “No.”

  “I have to—”

  “You have to come over here,” I said, referring to her apartment. “We need someone to go through all these HIV files from Dr. Tobel. I don’t know if it’s connected in any way—”

  “It’s not connected.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We do know that. It’s the Chimeragen work that’s important.”

  “We can’t leave any stone unturned, honeybunch. Besides, you understand HIV. Retroviruses aren’t my thing. But give me a good filovirus and a cup of coffee, and—”

  “Nate . . .”

  I guess she was tired of the joking. “What?”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  CHAPTER 80

  For all the hype and hoopla from the press and from Alaine Chen, the headquarters of Chimeragen looked pretty drab. Then again, in Silicon Valley all the architecture was pretty drab. People busy crafting the future have no time for silly aesthetics. People crafting the future need foosball tables and video games.

  As it was, though, I was in postcrash California. There were no foosball tables, and the future-crafters had all gone back to consulting in Chicago or Boston. In fact, the entire office complex I now looked at was deserted except for the twenty percent occupied by Chimeragen. For Lease signs were posted on empty doors.

  A few other cars dotted the parking lot: two junkers at the far end of the lot and a Mercedes and a BMW near the Chimeragen entrance. One of the German vehicles, I assumed, belonged to Otto Falk.

  When I’d spoken to the man himself, he asked me to meet him at the Chimeragen offices. Normally, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but I had just mopped up the carcasses of two gutted canines and was leery about meeting the man on his turf. I mean, I didn’t think that Otto Falk had broken into Brooke’s place with baling wire and a sharp knife, but I suspected he wasn’t totally innocent, either.

  I walked to the glass door emblazoned with the company logo, which involved a cometlike thing underlining the name and circling around the “n” in “Chimeragen.” There was a buzzer next to the door. I rang.

  A figure appeared in the reception room and walked to the door. The person was much taller than I remembered Otto Falk. Perhaps Chimeragen was also doing work on a growth serum that could give sixty-year-old scientists another five inches. If that were the case, I’d invest immediately. Hell, I’d down some of the elixir that morning. I’d always wanted to be six three.

  But it wasn’t Otto Falk. It was, to my chagrin, Ian Carrington—tall, blond, teeth so white it looked like he brushed with Clorox. He shined that smile at me through the glass. I shielded my eyes from the glare.

  Mr. Carrington punched something into a keypad and manually unlatched a lock. “Dr. McCormick, good to see you again,” he boomed, and thrust out his hand. As I shook it, I tried to imagine that hand pulling a knife through a dog, tried to imagine it pulling a rope around Gladys Thomas’s neck. The grip was firm, but I still couldn’t picture it.

  “Likewise,” I lied.

  Carrington held the door open for me, and I entered into the nondescript reception room: a desk for the receptionist, a few chairs, a low table with some science and business publications.

  “Welcome to our humble corporate offices,” he said. I noticed that Carrington locked the dead bolt. The keypad beeped. Two locks. Bad sign.

  Carrington led me through another door. This one had a biometric lock—he placed his hand on a pad; it scanned and beeped. The only way for me to break in to this place, I thought, would be to lop off Ian Carrington’s hand and hold it to the scanner. All in all, not such a bad idea.

  We walked down a carpeted hallway, white walls, brown wooden doors. Near the end of the corridor, one of the doors was open. Carrington went to it and ushered me into a conference room. I entered. Otto Falk stood. Ian Carrington closed the door.

  Falk stuck out his hand and I shook it. “Dr. McCormick. So nice of you to come.”

  Well, I guessed I should feel good that everyone was so damned happy to see me.

  “Sit,” Falk said. “Please sit.” And with a graciousness that is peculiar to dictators, Nazi generals, and power-drunk CEOs, Falk bowed slightly and waved his hand at the chair in front of me. I sat and waited for the bullet in the back of my head.

  No gun went off and Falk and Carrington took their seats.

  Now that I saw him up close, Otto Falk looked every inch the surgeon, despite his small stature: close-cropped thin gray hair, shiny pate, trimmed goatee. His glasses were too stylish for a physician his age, but then again, he was in California. And he was a businessman as well as a doctor.

  No one spoke for a moment. After a good dose of uncomfortable silence, Otto Falk looked at me paternally and said, “We know you are upset by Dr. Tobel’s passing.”

  “I sure as hell am upset.”

  “We all are. It was a great loss to us.” He cleared his throat. “But I wonder if her death has—forgive me—somehow confused you as to the situation out here.”

  “I don’t think I’m confused, Dr. Falk.”

  “Perhaps, then, misguided is a better word.” That same paternal look—half smile, relaxed face. “Dr. McCormick, do you know how many people in this country are waiting for a kidney?”

  The question seemed to come out of nowhere, but actually, I knew the answer, having read the prospectus for Chimeragen at the library the day before. “Fifty thousand.”

  “Fifty thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight as of last month.” He let the exact number sink in. And when you think about it, it is an extraordinary number of people. More than the population of the small city in which I grew up. He
said, “Sixty percent of them will die waiting for a suitable match. How many people are waiting for a liver?”

  “Eighteen thousand,” I said.

  “Eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty-two. Eighty percent of those people will die waiting.” He leaned back in his chair. “You’ve been doing your homework, Dr. McCormick.”

  I waved my hand. “Nah. I have so much money left over from med school and residency, I don’t know what to do with it, so I’m looking for investment ideas. Your company’s prospects seem very promising.”

  Falk exchanged a look with Carrington and did not reply. The man was not averse to silences, and he let this one linger.

  Eventually, he said, “I don’t need to say more than that, do I, about how important it is what we’re working on?” I guess he didn’t need to say it, but he did anyway. “We’re on the precipice, Dr. McCormick, of saving tens of thousands of lives a year. Tens of thousands! In this country alone. Can you imagine? You are a public health official, so you understand these numbers. But for you, tens of thousands of people are saved by building latrines and by antibiotics. Tens of thousands are not saved by high technology and by procedures. I know this. I know how public health looks at ‘science.’ Put more money toward education, you say! Toward prevention!”

  Falk thumped his fist on the table. I could see where the unbridled enthusiasm came from, but I was not used to seeing it in academics. It was obvious, Otto Falk had been in quite a few venture capitalists’ offices, bowling them over with juggernaut hyperbole, big hand gestures, and exclamation points. No wonder they’d given him millions to invest.

  Even so, I wasn’t a venture capitalist, and I was a little taken aback by this pitch. I mean, did these guys think they could dazzle me with pictures of a rosy future and make me forget about the dead dogs, about dead Douglas Buchanan and rape, about poor dead Gladys Thomas?

  “Look at the numbers, Doctor. They don’t lie. You saw the patients in the hospital. They don’t lie.” Falk studied me with a little half smile. “Oh, yes, Dr. McCormick, we know you went into the hospital to look at our facilities there. Were you impressed?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Good,” he said. “You should be.” He paused. “In the patients you saw, we have detected virtually no immunologic response, no rejection. And they are on very low doses of immunosuppressive drugs. Very low doses, Doctor.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Ah, the easiest question and the hardest one.”

  Spare me the zen bullshit, Otto.

  “In the simplest terms, we stripped away all the markers that label these organs as foreign. We did this through tissue-engineering procedures developed by me and my colleagues. The animals from which these organs come lack all surface sugars and surface proteins that identify the tissue as other. These organs are blanks; they are universal spare parts.” Falk grinned at me. “You see how monumental this is, Dr. McCormick. This is a revolution on par with the discovery of antibiotics. We have discovered . . . we have worked out how to make an organ that functions in almost anybody. The power of the technique is unparalleled. We start with kidneys and liver and we go to pancreas, to lungs, to heart.”

  Falk was a little red faced now. He must have felt he was about to blow a hose, because he took a breather. When he’d calmed down, he said, “I do not care about money, Dr. McCormick. I have enough to have a nice house and a nice car. I have enough for my family.” I thought I heard him choke a little on the word family, but I might have imagined it. “There are those who care about money. Some of my staff, for example. My investors definitely.” He looked at Ian Carrington, who just smiled blankly. “This venture will pay them handsomely. People will make tens of millions of dollars. Some may make hundreds of millions. You see, this country now relies on donations of organs. However, if we manufacture organs, we will be able to charge for them what the market will bear.” He didn’t have to tell me the market would bear astronomical prices. Your life or $50,000. Your life or $100,000. An easy choice.

  “I myself have placed the stock I own in this company into a trust. It will go to support a foundation that will support research and also defray the cost of the organs for those who cannot afford them. Already, I have commitments from my staff and from some investors to place some of their stock in the trust as well.”

  He seemed to want me to say something, so I said, “That’s very generous of you.”

  “Well, I am a doctor. And I have been called to this profession to do more than play golf every afternoon or to complain about what managed care has done to my practice.” Falk then stood up to his full sixty-five inches and picked up a book that had been lying on the table. He walked over to me and opened it, it seemed, to a random page. It was a photo album, and I found myself staring at the picture of a little boy. “That’s Daryl Tennenbaum. He’s dead. Kidney failure after fighting off septicemia. On the page opposite him is Dody Fisk. Dead. Liver failure. We tried to transplant two years ago, but it was rejected.” Falk flipped to a page deeper into the book. Four more pictures. “Kenneth Billings. Thirty and diabetic. Dead from kidney failure. We could not find a match. Geraldine Nieman. Thirty-four. Dead from an infection she picked up while on dialysis. It is an outrage that these people are dying, Dr. McCormick. An outrage. And we are close to being able to do something about it.” He closed the photo album. “You understand the situation.”

  In fact, I didn’t. This flurry of justification was unexpected. Though I didn’t know exactly what would come of the meeting here, I’d been prepared for something a lot more sinister. Instead, what I got was some Holy Roller sermon on how much good he was doing.

  “I understand.”

  “And we are very close to helping these people. We are extremely close to a book this thick with smiling faces with birth dates and no death dates. Do you see, now, the magnitude of what we’re doing?”

  “Yes,” I said. I did see the magnitude. And as such, I saw how much these guys had to protect. So much that someone might be willing to take a few lives to save it. Kill a few to save thousands. On the surface, it seemed like a simple equation.

  “If I may speak?” It was Ian Carrington, he of the gleaming teeth. Falk nodded.

  “Dr. McCormick, I got into this on the business side,” Carrington said, and I wondered which business side he meant—Chimeragen’s or Alaine Chen’s—“and I have to tell you that business has taken a backseat to the good we’ll be able to do.”

  The bullshit was getting so deep, I almost had trouble seeing Carrington’s face. Thank God for the teeth. I locked onto the shine.

  “Sure, we all stand to make a lot of money, but the number of lives this will save . . . it almost made me want to be a doctor.” Right, Ian. “It’s offering me the chance to do some good in the world. I cut my teeth on tech companies—I took one public about five years ago, then led investments in a few small biotech firms—but this is the opportunity to be part of something much bigger than myself. The nobility of what we’re doing—”

  I couldn’t take it anymore from this tool. He’d been speaking for less than two minutes and I still couldn’t take it. “Shut up, Ian.”

  There was sort of a stunned silence. Carrington’s smile flickered for a moment, I guess as he waited for me to let him know it was a joke. Finally, he got that it wasn’t a joke, and the smile faded.

  I turned to Falk. “Why did you ask me here?”

  He forced a smile. “I wanted you to know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”

  “I knew what you were doing.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The timbre of our meeting had definitely taken a dark turn, but that was fine with me. This goody-good front was unexpected, bizarre, and though it might have been genuine at its core, there was so much shit covering it now I couldn’t really see the nobility Otto Falk was spewing. It was like the surgeon’s moral compass got broken somewhere along the way and, though he’d started out okay,
he was now following an errant, fucked-up path. Plus, I was under no illusions about what these guys thought of me. If there were no laws against murder, I was sure I’d be pushing up daisies. Or, more likely, I’d be a brain-dead host for some pig lungs.

  Anyway, I needed to fish for some answers and get the hell out of there. So I fished away. “What happened to the woman in Room Three in the hospital? Why is she gone?”

  If these two were taken aback by my question, they didn’t show it.

  “You saw the empty room,” Falk said.

  I nodded. They must have known, too, that I’d seen the videotape.

  Falk cleared his throat. “She died of a nosocomial staph infection.”

  A nosocomial infection is one picked up in the hospital. Staphylococcus is a common agent.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “It’s a tragedy,” Falk replied, “but that is it.”

  I nodded. I could see the rest of this meeting wasn’t going to get me very far, but I needed to know their motivation for asking me here, so I said, “This is all really super stuff, guys, but I have to ask: Why the hell did you ask me here?”

  Again, the two men exchanged looks. Falk let Carrington speak. “Dr. McCormick, we wanted you to know what we are doing—”

  “We’ve been through this,” I cut in.

  Carrington didn’t acknowledge the interruption. “We wanted you to know that we are on your side. We know, too, that you’ve been concerned about certain . . . occurrences. But you’re on the wrong track. That track—the wrong one—has consequences for us. And for all of the patients who could be helped by us.”

  Otto Falk was staring at the table, eyes half-closed. He looked up slowly. “We would be more than happy to work with the CDC, to show you all of our data on infection, on the porcine endogenous retroviruses and a hundred other infectious agents. But I assure you that you’ll find nothing. The animals we use have been tested and tested by a scientist no less eminent than Harriet Tobel. The FDA has been scrutinizing us from the beginning, and they have found nothing.”