by Greg Dragon
Jamie writhed in his arms, moaning and crying out. In a brief moment of lucidity, she opened her eyes and reached out for Angel, begging her to help her. But then she was gone again, lost once more in the terrible abyss of her pain.
Angel took a step forward, and the man flinched. “For the last time,” she said, “let her go. Let us go!”
She knew he wasn’t going to be able to hold her much longer. Sweat poured down his face, getting into his eyes, darkening his collar. And where his skin wasn’t covered in blood, she could see it had gone pale. His whole body was shaking. But it was the look of desperation in his eyes that impelled Angel to act before he could. She stepped forward without warning and swung the gun up, then down before he could even react. The butt of the grip connected with the side of his head with a sickening thud.
He crumpled to the floor, releasing Jamie.
Angel caught her and pulled her away, cringing with disgust at the hardness of the swellings pressed against her own belly. It reminded her of an exercise her anatomy professor had made her go through her first year at Sorbonne. They’d been required to learn the names of all the bones in the body, as well as their identifiable processes, not just by sight, but by feel. To challenge his students, he had placed a dozen plastic bone models inside each of several pillowcases and required them to list all twelve bones and their parts correctly.
That’s what Jamie’s belly felt like, a bag filled with bones.
The man lay moaning on his side. She’d hit him on the temple, aiming for the nerve bundle called the parotid plexus. Theoretically, it was supposed to overwhelm him. Even so, it had surprised her how easily he’d gone down.
But he obviously wasn’t going to stay down for long. He hadn’t even lost consciousness.
Quickly removing the laces from his shoes, she bound him just as he’d done to her. Just as she should have done the first time. Then, for good measure, she yanked off his socks and stuffed them into his mouth to keep him quiet.
By the time she’d finished, he was fully awake again. There was no misinterpreting the hatred in his eyes.
“Si les regards pouvaient tuer,” she muttered at him. “If looks could kill.” Then she spat in his face.
Chapter Forty
The private jet spearing its way toward the coastline of mainland Europe had encountered a patch of rough air, forcing Alvin Cheong to return to his seat and belt in on the advice of the pilot. He watched helplessly as the stack of printouts on the table slid to one side, then flutter to the floor as the plane tilted into a perilously steep bank. Moments like this reminded him of exactly why he disliked flying, even as he enjoyed the convenience of it. The sense of helplessness extended beyond his inability to attend to the papers. It had to do with his complete and utter dependence upon machines and their operators to keep him alive, sometimes in apparent defiance of natural laws.
He was on his way to the Saint-Exupéry airport in Lyon. In all his global travels, he’d never been through there, so when he was told where they would be landing, the name had brought an unexpected memory to the surface, followed by a deep sense of loss. So strong was the feeling, in fact, that on the way to Newark Liberty from Manhattan, he asked his driver to pull into a small rundown plaza with a used bookshop called THE READING EDGE. It was there, in the donation bin, that he found the book he was looking for, a dog-eared copy of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, its pages yellowed with age and the back cover affixed with old tape from which the adhesive had long since dried out. He had his driver pay the owner a dollar for it, and slipped it into a plastic bag for the journey.
But now that bag, with the book still inside, was as much out of his reach as was the avalanche of papers he’d been sorting through when the turbulence hit, copies of documents and photographs gleaned from the Manhattan apartments of both David Eitan and Angelique de l’Enfantine. As for Washington, DC, Cheong was still waiting to hear from his man there.
On his lap was the copy of the Eitan-de l’Enfantine divorce filing dated eighteen months earlier. He’d snatched it from the pile to read while the plane rode out the rough weather, and now he flipped distractedly through it hoping to keep his mind off the fact that so many things could go wrong at any moment, while so many things had to go right — and keep on going right — for the plane to stay suspended in the air.
He came to the claims of irreconcilable differences and tried to focus on what that meant. The two had been separated for some eighteen months by then. Any judge would have been convinced by the passage of that amount of time to accept that their differences must have been, as asserted, irreconcilable.
He was having trouble buying it.
He had no concrete evidence to the contrary, nothing more than a vague feeling, a suspicion. Perhaps it was in the wording, the hesitant way that the attorney depicted the relationship between the couple. There were no descriptions of acrimony. And in reading the scant post-separation correspondence his crew had found between the two, there was no sense of any bitterness. Instead, the notes were filled more with regret and loneliness.
His eyes strayed again to the plastic bag on the seat opposite him. He considered risking unbuckling himself and fetching it. How long had it been since he’d first read the story of the lonely little prince? Twenty years? Twenty-five? Not since he’d been brought to the United States as a teenager. It seemed to him that Angelique de l’Enfantine was like that lost little boy, searching the cosmos for a friend.
Hadn’t he crashed his airplane?
He placed his fingers on the buckle, determined to assert his will, but the plane shook again, violently enough this time to make the plastic molding in the cabin creak and the tables rattle. He heard the stifled exclamations of a couple team members outside his private cabin. And in his personal bar, the liquor bottles clinked together. He decided to stay put.
He turned to the last page of the court filing. Neither party had signed it. Rather, in the right-hand margin, someone had scribbled:
hold until can confirm david’s ip exposure as regards license agrmt
~s.a.
He frowned. Somewhere in the stack of papers he had come across a one-year option to license Eitan’s invention of a synthetic gene reprogramming technology. He hadn’t read it, had instead been prompted to search for the patent application which Eitan had filed when his first company, MECH INVIVO, was established over six years ago. Reading that document, Cheong quickly realized that the technology was one of those pie-in-the-sky type things, a discovery that Eitan had made early on in his graduate work. The idea he proposed seemed utterly impractical. There were already tools available that could accomplish much of what he suggested, though admittedly on a much more limited scale. Modified viruses, for example, had become commonplace in genetic engineering. Eitan’s proposal had depended upon synthetic technologies rather than biochemical or organic ones, and most of them didn’t exist and likely would not exist for decades: computer processors at a molecular scale; streamlined algorithms one trillion times as robust yet one trillion times as compact as those currently in use; on-the-fly reprogramming of networked processors remotely based on unicellular genetic codes. The man’s vision was so ahead of its time that it was unfeasible.
And yet it had piqued someone’s interest. Why?
And whose?
The timing of that option, along with the scribbled notation coinciding with Eitan’s and de l’Enfantine’s separation, were other peculiarities. It almost seemed as if someone was worried about her interference. He had no doubt that Angelique would have known about any interest in her husband’s inventions at the time. But if they had gone through with the divorce, then she’d almost certainly have been left out of the loop. Was someone trying to cut her out of the discussion? The profits?
The latter didn’t really make that much sense. After all, she was far richer than he, and it was to his financial benefit to remain married to her. She’d opened up her checkbook to him, had funded his second startup company, had continued to p
ay his expenses, even after their separation. Even after the divorce papers had been drafted (but never officially filed). The second apartment in Manhattan, for example, the one with Eitan’s name on the lease, was still being paid for out of her family accounts in France.
He became aware of the pilot’s voice over the intercom, informing him that the rough patch of air was now behind them, and that everyone was welcome to remove their seatbelts and walk about for the remaining minutes they had before landing.
Alvin Cheong released his restraint and stood. He stared balefully at the avalanche of papers for a moment, then he strode over to the bar and poured a couple fingers of fifty-year-old Macallan scotch whiskey into a glass that had been sterilized and sealed inside plastic. It was a treat he reserved for rare occasions, since at twelve grand for a bottle the price tag was a bit steep, even for him. He also regretted that whatever remained once he debarked the plane would need to be poured down the drain. But the malt was one of few good ones he knew to be safe, as it had been bottled in the mid-eighties, before the world began its descent into the mess it was in now.
Taking the glass, he returned to the table, and began to resort the papers.
Chapter Forty One
”No,” Jamie protested, her voice little more than a whisper. “I’m not going.”
Angel kneeled over the girl and rested her hand tentatively on one of the bulges in her abdomen. “You’re very sick. Does that hurt when I push here?”
She shook her head.
“Then what hurts?”
“Everything . . . . Nothing. I don’t know.” Jamie tried to swallow, winced. “My stomach hurts. And my back, when I move. And . . . down there.”
Angel slid her hand from one side of the girl’s belly to the other while applying slight pressure on the protuberances. Jamie didn’t flinch. She didn’t even seem to notice. Angel pressed harder, but there was still no reaction.
It was terribly frustrating, trying to understand what was happening to the girl without the basic tools she had had when she was doing her medical studies. Completing her examination simply by touch and sight, Angel felt confident enough only to consider her earlier diagnosis of internal bleeding as a less probable cause of the abdominal distension, though she still couldn’t rule it out entirely, at least as a secondary diagnosis. The paleness of the girl’s skin, her rapid heartbeat and shallow respirations, the sunken eyes and chapped lips, all suggested she might be suffering from hypovolemia as a result of internal bleeding. But those symptoms could also be a result of the pain she was experiencing. Determining the source of that pain was what really mattered.
Palpitating those odd, hard deformations had revived the old bag-of-bones memory. But, in the end, she decided that the girl had to be suffering from intestinal hernias, several of them at once. It seemed a reasonable diagnosis, since the trauma she’d suffered from the crash a week earlier could have easily torn several small perforations in her abdominal wall. The strain of pushing the laundry cart at the hospital must have widened the tears, allowing her intestines to bulge through.
It was still just a guess, she knew. In her years of medical school and as a resident at Stanford, she couldn’t recall ever having witnessed such an extreme case as this, but the hardness and irregularity of the protrusions, as well as the fact that they could be pushed in slightly — reduced was the medical term — and the intermittent pain she suffered while moving, all seemed consistent with that conclusion.
The good news was, if that diagnosis were correct, then the girl was in somewhat less danger than Angel had first imagined. The bad news was, without corrective surgery, the herniated intestines could strangulate, atrophy, and turn gangrenous, requiring immediate emergency surgery. As it was, the girl was likely to lose at least a portion of her small intestine. And if she were really unlucky, the herniated organ would rupture, spilling bacteria into her abdominal cavity and leading to septic shock. If that were to happen, she would die a very quick, very painful death.
Which is why she needed to get to a hospital. And why she needed to remain as immobile as possible to prevent the hernias from getting any worse.
“I need you to lie still,” Angel told her. “I mean it this time. Don’t move.” The girl was exhausted after the last episode of screaming, so getting her to comply didn’t seem like it would be a problem. But if the pain returned . . . .
“The nurse’s . . . office,” Jamie answered, moaning. “Check there.”
“I know. I’m going to see if I can find a — some way to carry you, a civière — I don’t know how to say it in English. Litter? I don’t want you to walk to the car. We’ll find a hospital and—“
“No,” Jamie told her, trying to sit up. Angel placed a hand on her shoulder and urged her to remain lying on the floor. But the girl reached over and grasped Angel’s arm with a weak grip. “No hospital. Won’t help. Only . . . . Must be a cure.”
“You need surgery!”
“Surgery won’t help! There has to be a cure!”
Angel tried to pull away, but Jamie’s fingers hardened into a claw. She tried to pry them off and couldn’t. “Jamie, please, we have to—“
“I SAID CHECK IN THE OFFICE! IT’S IN THERE!”
She jerked away at the force of Jamie’s shout and fell onto her back, relieved that the girl had released her to clutch at her stomach again. She scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding. For a moment, she thought about submitting to her instinct to turn around and run. If she had known a week ago how much her world would turn upside down, she would never have come to China in the first place. Especially after all the hard work she had done to keep herself under control these past few stressful years.
Nevertheless, she felt her mind threatening to slip away. The buzz of chaos inside her head grew loud, thrumming like vibrating wires stretched to their limit. Her brain strained, wanting to relinquish control of her body. But she couldn’t let that happen. Not again.
She wrestled herself back, took in a deep breath and held it, and waited for the beating in her temples to subside.
“Okay,” she said at last. “Okay, I’ll take a quick look.”
The man on the floor had stopped struggling and was now just watching them. She didn’t trust him, of course. But if she were going to leave Jamie here in the hallway, she couldn’t leave him alone with her, not even for a moment. Not even tied up. The shoelaces were barely adequate, no guarantee that he wouldn’t escape. And she didn’t like the murderous look in his eyes. He’d allowed them to escape from him twice. There wouldn’t be a third time.
She checked through his clothes, ignoring his defiant grunts, avoiding his angry glare. She’d already taken away his knife. This time, she emptied his pockets, removing his car keys and placing them into her own pocket. She also found a single loose round for his gun. “So much for wishing I had that bullet back,” she told him, holding it in front of his eyes so he could see it.
That was all she found on him. He had no other weapon and no identification, which surprised her. She figured it could be in his car. She also considered the possibility that he might not be carrying any on purpose.
Grabbing him by the back of his shirt, she dragged him down the hallway to the nurse’s office. She was halfway there when she heard a moan behind her and noticed Jamie trying to follow. “I told you to stay there!” she shouted, and wiped sweat from her eyes. “Don’t move. You’re making yourself worse.”
She left the man in a corner of the office out of her way and turned around. It was her first real opportunity to look at the room, and it struck her that it wasn’t equipped in the manner of a typical nurse’s station. Nor, for that matter, was it like any other type of medical treatment facility she was familiar with. There was a patient table along the left-hand wall and the standard blood pressure cuff and ophthalmoscope mounted above it. Syringes and cotton swabs sat in glass jars nearby. There was a stainless steel sink and hand soap. But the resemblance ended there.
The b
ench in the middle of the room made the place look more like a laboratory. Indeed, the equipment on it was more typical of a research setting than a medical one. There was the microscope, where the man had been sitting when she’d accidentally surprised him. A Petri dish sat beside it, holding the small shard of bone he’d brought from the hospital. An edge had been shaved away exposing the whiteness beneath a coating of dark, clotted blood. A glass slide had been placed on the stage of the scope, presumably with the shavings on it. Based on what she’d heard, she was tempted to look, but resisted. There was no time for such nonsense.
Her eyes swept the room, but there was no litter to be seen, and nothing which she could use in its stead. The examination table was a simple stainless steel platform and pad, but it was bolted to the floor and couldn’t be moved.
Besides the microscope, the bench held a tabletop microtube centrifuge, a small research water bath, and a row of liquid handling micropipettes. These were common laboratory items like the ones she had used during her first-year research studies at the Sorbonne.
But on a narrower bench, along the back wall behind the microscope, were additional pieces of equipment that she didn’t recognize. One looked like a miniature computer server. Another resembled a wireless transmitter. Everything was plugged into a power strip that snaked up the wall and was clamped to the edge of the benchtop.
Out in the hallway, Jamie howled again, reminding Angel of the urgency of their situation. The sound made her flesh crawl.
To the right of the main door, in the corner of the wall behind the table, was a panel. She hadn’t noticed it earlier as it had a poster taped over it with a cartoon depicting the inside of a human body. The skin was peeled back, revealing the various muscle groups, blood vessels, and internal organs. She went over and saw that the panel was a pocket door, and she slid it into its slot, only to find a second door behind it. This one was made of glass. The room beyond was unlit.
