Runaway Heart (2003)

by Stephen Cannell

  "Good question," Jack blurted.

  "It is a good question," Carolyn Adjemenian agreed. "There is no way anybody could do this without taking a DNA sample from the animal and scanning it. It would be virtually impossible to come up with this by reverse-engineering it. There are things in the genome that would be impossible to make up like the structure of the coding regions and their connections to one another. Is that clear?"

  "No," all of them said at once.

  "The answer to your question is: This is legit. Somebody has actually upgraded a chimpanzee and fed the hybrid animal's DNA into the computer to construct this map. But I haven't a clue as to why."

  Zimmy didn't have a clue either, but Jack and the Strockmires had been over it all before when this thing was an imaginary, hybrid space alien. Now they were back to Herman's theory of a genetically engineered monkey-human. A chimera with the strength of ten. A disposable soldier.

  Suddenly, Jack heard the same noise he'd heard outside Donna Zimbaldi's apartment four car doors slamming. Then he caught a glimpse of someone running past the window in a low crouch.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine.

  Herman was holding the printout of the chimera

  gene map, thinking he had to find a way to get this into court. DARPA was doing illegal science on chimpanzees, so he could file under the federal rules of civil procedure, section 65. It was during this thought that Jack interrupted him. "I think the CDF is outside." "What?" Carolyn Adjemenian asked as Zimmy jumped to his feet and began looking frantically for some place to hide.

  Herman glanced around, his eyes wild like a drunk caught in a hotel fire. Susan grabbed his arm. Carolyn demanded: "What the hell is CDF?" "The guys who designed this damn animal want the plans back," Herman said, clutching the encryption.

  "Leave it," Jack ordered. "It's what they're after. Let 'em take it. Zimmy e-mailed a copy to your computer anyway."

  "Good idea. If they think they've got it, maybe they'll stop chasing us," Susan agreed.

  "They're outside now?" Carolyn blurted as she shut down the computer and retrieved the disk.

  "Somebody just ran past the window," Jack replied. He dug the receiver chip he'd taken from the phony magazine salesman out of his coat pocket and jammed it into his ear.

  "Angel Two, we're covered. Set up your entry," he heard someone announce. "Get ready to kick the door."

  "Hold positions until we're all in place," came the reply.

  "They're getting ready to kick the door," Jack said.

  "Let's go out the back," Zimmy urged, then bolted. Jack grabbed him and yanked him back. "It's covered. These guys are noisy getting out of vehicles, but their special entry tactics aren't bad."

  "How'd they find us? We ditched them at your office." Gino was looking to Jack for an answer.

  "They still have a bug planted on us."

  "Where could they hide it?" Susan said.

  "Inside Herm," Jack said. "Planted during the operation at Groom Lake. They couldn't believe we weren't in my office. The GPS said we were, but we were two feet away, hiding next door."

  "Okay, we're good to go," the chip in Jack's ear announced.

  "They're coming in," Jack stressed.

  "We could go next door," Carol suggested.

  "We can't go outside," Jack repeated.

  "We don't need to, it's a duplex. My boyfriend's a doctor. We sleep on that side. There's a door between the units."

  As they ran down the hall, Herman saw Jack duck into the master bedroom, remove one of the weights from Carolyn's lat machine, and take it with him. They went through a door in the back that led to a laundry porch shared by both units, and slipped into the apartment next door.

  Carolyn's boyfriend turned out to be huge. A bodybuilder. He got up from his office computer and wide-armed his way into the hall.

  "What's going on, Carolyn?" he said, his voice an octave too high for a guy that big.

  "Tim, somebody's trying to take the gene map I've been working on."

  "We gotta split before they decide to look over here."

  While Tim was talking, Jack heard the order to go in. Both doors were kicked, followed by the sound of running footsteps in the hall next door. They could hear them shouting through the shared wall.

  "Living room clear!"

  "Bedroom clear!"

  Carolyn opened the side door to the carport, and sitting there under a light was a red Chevy Suburban. Jack immediately reached up and knocked the light out with his gun barrel.

  "You're coming with us," Jack told them. Carolyn and Tim nodded and headed for the front seat of the Suburban. But Jack held Tim's muscle-bound arm, pulling him back. "I'm driving."

  Jack grabbed the keys out of his hand and piled everyone into the SUV. He dug the chip out of his ear, started the engine, and handed Herman the ten-pound lead weight. "Put this over your heart."

  "Why?"

  "It's lead. It'll mask the transmission."

  "But, we don't know for sure I . . ."

  "Lawyers always an argument!" Jack snapped.

  Herman clutched the weight to his chest as Jack started the engine. "Everybody down."

  They ducked below the windows while he backed out, making a slow, three-point turn, doing it like he had all the time in the world. He switched on the headlights and began cruising up the street at about ten miles an hour. Herman popped up and peeked out the rear window. The brown Econoline van was still at the curb in front of the duplex. Then Jack rounded the corner and they were out of sight.

  "The bug quit," Valdez said. He was inside the van looking at the GPS monitor. "They musta found it."

  "How could they find it? It's inside the fucking guy," Pettis answered.

  "I'm just telling you, there's no signal." Valdez was uncharacteristically pissed. His dry-biscuit calm had evaporated in a surge of genuine panic. He waited as the four plainclothes CDF troops rushed out the front door of the duplex and motioned that everything inside was clear.

  "This can't be happening." Valdez glared at Pettis, who was still buckled into the command chair next to him.

  "What about the SUV that pulled out a minute ago?"

  "Maybe you're right and the bug did quit," Valdez said. "Let's go." He waved his men back to the van. The CDF troopers piled in. One handed the fifty-page encryption to Valdez. "They left this."

  The driver punched it, speeding after the SUV. When they reached the end of the block they turned left, then right, then left, trying to get to the freeway on-ramp, but in their hurry they had misread the GPS map and taken a wrong turn. They wound up at the end of a cul-de-sac, half a block from the 405.

  "Fuck!" Valdez raged, the recovered gene map forgotten in his hand.

  It was the first time Captain Pettis ever saw the assistant director lose it.

  Chapter Thirty.

  "Whatta you think you're doing with that thing?" Dr.

  Shiller asked, looking at the ten-pound weight that Herman was cradling against his chest like a lead blankie.

  Herman was back in the cardio unit at Cedars wearing one of their fashion-ugly, balloon-decorated backless nightgowns. Susan was standing next to his bed. Jack was out of sight behind the open door.

  Shiller glowered. He'd definitely had enough of the Strockmires. He took the lead weight off Herman's chest. "This is for a weight machine."

  "Doctor, I'm ready for the procedure now," Herman said.

  Doctor Shiller looked down at him as if he were deciding whether to hit him with the weight in his

  right hand or the metal clipboard in his left. "The nurse said your heart was fine when she took your vitals. She saw the sutures above your groin, so it looks as if you've already had the procedure. This is a busy hospital, Mr. Strockmire. Believe it or not, there are people in this cardio unit who are in actual medical danger."

  Herman looked at Susan. "You tell him. He won't listen to

  me.

  "Okay, Doctor, you're right, we think an operation was performed," she admitte
d. "Dad was kidnapped yesterday, and he was taken to . . ." she stopped. "He went out to . . ."

  She couldn't say Area 51. He'd throw them out.

  "Yes?" Shiller was seconds away from calling security.

  Herman took over. "Somebody did an operation on me. They may have implanted a radio transmitter inside me. A bug. Now they're following us, tracking me via satellite."

  "You people are wonderful," Shiller said, shaking his head. "From outer space is it? Nice twist."

  "Okay, you don't believe me? Take an X ray."

  "I'm not wasting any more time on you." Shiller started to leave, but Susan jumped up and blocked his exit.

  "Doctor, listen, please! My father has been involved in a very treacherous lawsuit. I told you about it before, remember?"

  Nothing from Shiller. No reaction at all.

  "Yesterday Dad came into possession of some very sensitive material that in the wrong hands could embarrass some very high-ranking Pentagon officials, maybe even the President. Because they wanted the material returned, my father was drugged and kidnapped. But Dad didn't have it on him. He'd given it to an expert to decode. They knew Dad would lead them to the material, so they planted a bug inside him to follow him until they got their hands on it. After the operation they let him go. Now they've got the material back. But they're still chasing us, because they want to kill us. The lead weight was to mask the bug and keep it from transmitting ..." She stopped because Shiller's look had shifted from anger to one of psychiatric concern.

  "If you will just open the incision and put a scope up there you'll find the transmitter, then you'll know we're telling the truth," she finished softly.

  "Please leave the hospital immediately," he finally said. "Otherwise, I'll call security and have you removed."

  Jack had been sitting quietly, unobserved in a folding chair behind the heavy door. As Susan explained her ridiculous story, he was trying to decide just how much deeper into this gunnysack he was prepared to go for no money and then as soon as he asked that question, he knew he was in all the way. He also knew he was in love with Susan Strockmire.

  "Hey, Doc," Jack whispered from behind the door.

  "What?" Shiller spun around, surprised to find him there. "Who are you?"

  "I'm Dr. Wirta, with the Wirta Eye Clinic."

  "An eye doctor?"

  He nodded. "A private eye institute. I've been consulting on this case, and I'll have to insist that you do exactly as the lady just instructed."

  "Oh, really?" Shiller was giving him an angry little smile that barely turned the corners of his mouth up. "Well, Doctor, unless you're a cardiologist or have some pretty good juice with the Physicians Review Board at this hospital, it's not going to happen."

  Jack pulled out his revolver and pointed it at Shiller. "Dr. Smith and Dr. Wesson are also consulting. You don't want to argue with these guys unless you're wearing Kevlar."

  "You can't be serious."

  "I'm dead serious excuse the pun and unless you want to

  decorate that wall you're standing next to, you better get this man into preop."

  "I'm not gonna perform surgery at gunpoint."

  "Yeah? Why not?" Jack asked.

  "Well . . . well, just because ..."

  Jack brought the S&W up chest high. " 'Just because' only works in third grade. I'll need something a little more substantial."

  "I ... I don't have an operating theater. I don't have an anesthesiologist."

  "They got all that stuff in the ER. Do it down there."

  "You know all about it, huh? You know what it takes to do one of these?"

  "It's an outpatient procedure. How tough can it be?"

  "This is outrageous."

  Jack thought that was a bit of an overstatement. It wasn't outrageous, at least not compared to the North Hollywood Bank shootout. Next to that, this was only highly unusual.

  The procedure took about forty minutes.

  On Jack's instructions, Shiller only gave Herman a local anesthetic, because Jack wanted to leave with him immediately after surgery.

  A probe and chip camera were fed into Herman's upper thigh, then threaded up through the vein to his heart. After a few minutes of searching, Shiller said, "There's where they fixed the arrhythmia. See on the scope . . . the little burn mark?"

  Jack couldn't see it; the video screen looked like a plate of spaghetti to him, so he took Shiller's word.

  Another minute or two of searching and they found the bug.

  "I got something," Dr. Shiller said through his surgical mask.

  After carefully unhooking one small suture, he grasped the tiny computer chip with the microscopic pincers on the surgical probe and withdrew it. They all watched on the TV monitor as it made a fascinating journey from Herman's sternal region, down the subscapular vein, through the thoracoepigastric vein, to the umbilical region, then into the great saphenous vein and out.

  Shiller dropped the tiny chip on a metal tray. The bug was about one-quarter of the size of an aspirin tablet. Jack had never seen a satellite transmitter that small.

  "What is it?" Shiller asked.

  "Transmitter." Jack said, then reached over and smacked it with his gun butt, turning it to powder.

  "You mean all that stuff was true?" Shiller seemed amazed.

  But Jack was a student of human nature, and he could still read anger and defiance in the doctor's eyes. Shiller was just the type of guy who would try to get Jack to put the gun down and then either jump him or call security.

  "How long until he can be moved?" Jack asked.

  "That's up to him. Depends on how he feels."

  "Herm?"

  "I'm a little woozy, but I can make it."

  "Okay, then we'll get you a wheelchair and leave." He opened the OR door and looked out at Susan, who couldn't bear to watch and was waiting in the hall. "Get a chair."

  "How's Dad?"

  "He's fine. We got it out," Jack said.

  A few minutes later she rolled the wheelchair into the OR. Jack instructed Shiller to lift Herman off the table and settle him into the wheelchair. All five of them trooped out of the hospital. Susan led the way, carrying Herman's clothes. Jack brought up the rear, strolling casually behind the doctor with his S&W in his sport coat pocket, feeling like a character in a Scorsese movie.

  Zimmy, Carolyn, and her muscle-bound boyfriend had picked up a car for them at Rent-a-Wreck and left the keys on the top of the right front tire. Then they all decided to get lost, promising not to return to their homes.

  Jack retrieved the keys and loaded Herman into the backseat of an old Chrysler Imperial. Then Dr. Shiller, Susan, and Jack stood awkwardly next to the passenger door and searched for a way to say good-bye.

  "I'm sorry it had to happen this way, but thank you, Doctor," Susan said earnestly. Jack thought Dr. Shiller thawed about two degrees, but he didn't choose to say anything, so Jack got behind the wheel. Susan sat beside him, and with Herman sprawled in the back, they pulled away from Cedars-Sinai Hospital, fairly confident that nothing was beeping or flashing on a screen anywhere. No satellite tracks or Octopus tails, just three frightened people on the run in a beat-up car that barely ran.

  Chapter Thirty-One.

  They stopped at a gas station, and while Jack

  filled the tank Herman changed out of the hospital gown and placed a call from the pay phone to Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen's Hollywood office. They had donated money to the Institute in the past and were fierce environmentalists who worried about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, and the pollution of the oceans.

  He didn't expect to actually get them on the phone, because when they weren't in production they were at their home on Martha's Vineyard. Their secretary, Louise, answered.

  "It's Herman. How ya doing?" he said as soon as she picked up.

  "Jeez, Strock, we were just talking about you. Mary wanted to invite you to a Memorial Day party

  on the Vineyard, but we didn't know where to re
ach you."

  "Send the invite to the office in D.C. I'll be sure to make it if I can," he said. Then he told her that he wanted to borrow Ted's fishing boat for a few days because he needed a quiet place to work. Louise put him on hold while she got her bosses on the phone.

  She came back a few minutes later. "Ted says okay. Just be sure to lock up when you leave, and reset the alarm." She told him where the Hide-a-Key was and gave him the alarm code.

  Minutes later they were back in the rented Chrysler heading to Lido Island in Newport Beach.

  As he rested in the backseat new strategies and plans were forming in Herman's head. He was considering filing a temporary restraining order against the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A TRO was only good for ten days, renewable for an additional ten. Twenty days just might be enough time to do what he needed to do. There were federal laws already on the books prohibiting genetic cloning, and, although those laws were rarely enforced, Herman could still file under them.

  He made a mental list of things to do. He needed to retrieve his computer that was still at the beach house and download the gene map that Zimmy had e-mailed. He also had to contact Sandy Toshiabi, his animal-rights expert. He would need to talk to his secretary, Leona Mae, get her to pull together all the background material, legal precedents, and any other laws restricting genetic research or genetic engineering. There was a helluva lot to do and almost no time to do it.

  Also hovering in the back of his mind was what Dr. Adjemenian had said. This new animal, this chimera, was 99.1 percent human only nine tenths of one percent different from Homo sapiens.

  His preliminary strategy was simple yet compelling. Animal-rights activists had been trying to achieve legal standing in the courts for gorillas, chimps, and other primates for a long time. Legal "standing" currently only applied to Homo sapiens under the U.S. Constitution.

  Because no other species on the planet enjoyed legal standing, they had to seek injunctive or compensatory relief through an organization that would sue for redress on behalf of the animal. It was this very fact that had compelled Herman to create the Danaus Plexippus Foundation.