The Lake House

by James Patterson

  “I’m Dr. Ethan Kane, director of the Hauer Institute. My senior medical staff joins me in welcoming all of you to Maryland and to Liberty General Hospital.

  “Think of it! You’ve been chosen to take an extraordinary journey with us. You’ll be making medical history, making some very good money as well, and this will be the best experience you’ve ever had. I guarantee it!

  “Young men, today is your lucky day. You are essential to the future of America! And the rest of the world, for that matter.”

  Resurrection was right on schedule.

  The donors were marched inside.

  The beneficiaries would all be there by nightfall.

  87

  I WANTED TO BE STRONG but I was getting pretty close to losing it, something I almost never did until lately. Well, until that night when I first met Max in the Colorado woods, anyway.

  Oh God, poor sweet Oz was already dead. What had we gotten into? Who else might die before this was over? How could we stop the madness? How could we turn it off?

  I was in the front seat of Kit’s car, speeding along Route 194 toward the Hospital. A gathering storm was blowing in from the north. I shivered as seamless thunderheads dimmed the late-afternoon sun.

  The children, the ones who were still alive, were being held at the Hospital, or somewhere nearby. Kit and I knew that much. Just enough to scare us half to death. To give us the willies.

  “Maybe I should have taken the kids to the Lake House when we ran,” I said.

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Frannie. They would have found the kids no matter where you went. I’d rather take this fight to them. I don’t see another way. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  We had gotten a message just an hour ago: Come and talk. Tell no one, or the children will die. Hurry!

  We have eyes and ears with the local police. And the FBI! We don’t want to harm the children. . . . But we will.

  Pip lay curled up at my feet as Kit drove as fast as he could go on these narrow, twisting country roads. I thought of poor, sweet Oz again and again. I could still hear him telling me that he loved Max, still see the incredible happiness on his face, especially in his eyes. And in hers. It was unthinkably cruel that he should die so young. None other than Emily Dickinson had written, “Dying is a wild night and a new road.” No, I didn’t think so. Sorry, Miss Emily. Dying usually sucks the big one. That is what you should have written. What you did write sounds cool, but it’s bullshit.

  It was less than an hour’s drive to the Hospital, but I had lost all sense of time, and even of place. Whenever I looked over at Kit, I saw the terrible strain in his face. Come and talk . . . We don’t want to harm the children.

  I finally muttered Kit’s name and he reached for me, held my hand tightly, almost too tightly.

  A quarter of a mile later, I pointed to the discreet bronze sign, and Kit veered off the main road onto an unlit narrow lane. Just seeing the name Liberty General Hospital again was unsettling and turned my stomach.

  Soon a wide gravel drive appeared and Kit drove slowly up it. Crushed stone crackled under our wheels.

  We were about to loop around to the entranceway when a couple of bulky guys wearing hooded yellow rain slickers blocked our path.

  “How thoughtful of them. A welcoming committee,” Kit said. “Should we feel honored?”

  “Sure. I’ll bet the goon squad is here just for us.”

  “You haven’t told anyone, Kit? Not even a few close friends at the Bureau?” I asked.

  He didn’t speak, didn’t answer my question. Had he told someone in the FBI? Was that his plan?

  One of the men in yellow pointed toward a service ramp, and we headed there in the misty gloom. The ramp terminated at the base of a concrete loading dock. God, this was eerie. I almost couldn’t stand it.

  Kit braked to a stop but left the car engine running.

  “This is it. End of the line,” one of the yellow slickers said. How droll of him. Rubbing it in.

  He opened Kit’s door; the other bastard opened mine. “Madame,” my bastard intoned deeply, “this way, please. You’re expected.”

  From that point on, everything got a little fuzzy. Well, actually a lot fuzzy.

  I remember Pip lifting his leg against the wall. “Good boy,” I whispered.

  I remember being ordered to place my hands on the platform of the loading dock as the cold rain soaked right through my clothes.

  I remember being felt up. Top and bottom. Wanting to punch somebody in the face, but holding back. I remember the sharp stab of a needle in my right bicep.

  I remember the blur of faces as I swung my head around and saw the mirthless looks of our slickered captors.

  I don’t remember anything after that.

  Until I woke up.

  In a cage.

  88

  OZYMANDIAS CAME UP CLOSE—so wonderfully close—and kissed Max on the mouth. His taste was always so clean and sweet and good. Then he whispered, “Good-bye for now, my darling girl.”

  “No! No!” Max started to scream. “Please come back, Oz! Don’t leave me again. Ozymandias!”

  She burst out of the drugged sleep as if she were being pulled up from the depths of the ocean. She resisted consciousness, thinking instead of Oz, holding on to him. Pictures floated before her eyes; she heard his laughter. She imagined flying with him, soaring above the clouds, caressing him.

  But that is all such fake bullshit. Ozymandias is dead. This is no fairy tale with happy endings.

  This is the world—as humans see it, as they wish it to be. So sad, such a waste of potential, such a shame.

  Max snapped open her eyes and took stock of her awful, hateful surroundings.

  She was in a stuffy, foul-smelling, darkened, windowless room at the Hospital. Prison! Worse than prison. Hell! No this was worse than the fantasies man called hell.

  There was a stainless-steel sink and some cabinets across from her, and a big white-faced clock. It read 4:36, but she honestly didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon, or even what day it was.

  She was in a horrible, locked cage. She gauged the dimensions precisely: five feet long, three feet high, two feet deep. Just about right if you were a medium-sized dog.

  There were other cages against the adjacent walls. She could make out two dispirited chimps, three beagles, a shelf of caged rabbits and white rats.

  She was a lab animal again.

  Max’s eyes continued to search the room until she located Peter and Wendy. My God! Their small forms were enclosed in cages, too. How unbelievably sad. The twins were unconscious, but they seemed to be breathing.

  Were they?

  And where was Matthew?

  Ic?

  Frannie and Kit?

  Max noted the shredded-newspaper bedding on the floor of her cage. She’d also been given two chocolate-peanut PowerBars and a bottle of water. Thanks for nothing. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty. She wanted to die. She couldn’t stand captivity—not after being free.

  The paper gown crackled as she shifted, seeking a position that didn’t hurt. But that was impossible, wasn’t it?

  She hurt everywhere.

  The lab door opened, jolting her. Someone entered the semidarkness and closed the door. It was fricking Kane, the man she despised. The leader of the inhumans. She had been hearing about him since her days at the School—and now here he was, the monster of monsters.

  “Hello, Max,” he said, walking up to her cage. “I’ve got your latest test results back. Your intelligence is off the chart. That’s fabulous. We can’t even measure your IQ. Why, aren’t we just full of surprises?”

  “Why, aren’t we just full of shit?” she barked at him.

  “Now, now. You really knock my socks off. You’re even funny.”

  “Yeah, you’re a scream, too. They ought to get you to host Saturday Night Live. Are you letting us go? Of course you’re not!”

  “Well, no. I’m not. But I just wanted to tell you that you are one sm
art kid. It’s too bad your internal systems are so—how shall I put this?—unusual. But I do have a surprise for you.”

  Max fricking hated surprises. They were always, always bad. She closed her eyes. Looked away.

  “C’mon, Max, give me a nice smile. You’re going to like this.”

  She finally opened her eyes and turned them on her mortal enemy. “What is it?”

  “Look,” said Ethan Kane. He turned up the lights to reveal the rear of the room. “Your friends are here. Frannie, Kit, everybody. Except Ozymandias, of course.” Kane smiled again. What a scream he was, what a joker.

  If she possibly could, if she ever got the chance, she would break his neck.

  Break.

  His.

  Neck.

  89

  RESURRECTION WAS BEGINNING, and nothing would ever be the same again, and that was mostly because the fools of the world just couldn’t see it coming. Science was about to change the ethics governing life and death. It would change the way the human race perceived life in virtually every country around the globe. The medical breakthroughs would hit like meteors crashing to earth, and they would have the same explosive impact as a meteor storm.

  Patricia Stevenson held her husband’s hand tightly as their Learjet approached the small, unimposing airport in the rolling hills of Maryland.

  Patricia’s clear gray eyes were full of compassion for her Roger, who kept fading in and out of sleep. His cancer was so far advanced that no one could, or would, perform any more surgeries; the cancer had metastasized, from his colon into his lungs and spread to his liver.

  Roger Stevenson, her hugely talented, wonderfully generous husband, had only days to live. If that. He needed to be here . . . because the world couldn’t afford to lose him. Patricia genuinely believed that. And so, apparently, did the people at the Hospital.

  When the captain announced that they would be landing momentarily, the eighty-year-old woman reached over and tightened her husband’s seat belt. She kissed him on the cheek, then adjusted the jade green leather seat so that he would be in an upright position.

  She smoothed his baby-blue cashmere lap throw. At this touch, his eyes opened, and he seemed a little disoriented.

  “Patty? Is that you?”

  “Yes, darling. I’m right here. I’ll always be right here. We made it, Roger. We actually made it.”

  She and Roger were both wearing the best clothing money could buy: cashmere and Harris tweed and three-thousand-dollar handmade shoes. The jet had cost seven million and it was their own, as were the houses in Dallas, Palm Beach, and Bermuda. It had repeatedly been said that money couldn’t buy happiness, but whoever said it was wrong. Money might not always bring happiness, but it certainly could.

  Patricia stroked the mottled skin on Roger’s hands and gazed fondly at his face. She knew every line and wrinkle, the part in his hair, the way his fingers quivered now, all of his appetites and aversions, and stories oft told. Patty had known Roger nearly her whole life. They had been lovers since their early twenties and married for fifty-seven years. Patty Jo Clark Stevenson, originally from Lake Forest, Illinois, candy heiress, Vassar graduate, director of the Dallas Symphony Foundation, philanthropist, mother of five, grandmother of fourteen, felt the tug on her stomach as the airplane began its descent.

  She glanced briefly at the runway below before closing her eyes. She prayed to God that this was the right thing to do—that this was his will. Of course it was! Roger was so important, not just to her but to the whole world. A brilliant engineer by training, he had gone on to found not one, but two, Fortune 500 companies; he’d been the president for one term; then a close adviser to two other presidents. Of course he had to live! He of all people.

  The landing was soft, the Learjet kissing the tarmac and swiftly rolling to a halt. The overly polite young captain came back to the passenger compartment and made certain that the Stevensons were all right. Then he personally escorted them off the plane.

  As they walked very slowly down the steps, Patty saw the one man she trusted. Dr. Ethan Kane was standing at the foot of the staircase. He had a wheelchair for Roger. He smiled brilliantly, and she lifted her hand in greeting.

  “Look, Roger. It’s Ethan! Oh God, everything is going to be all right now.”

  Stretched out on the airfield directly behind Dr. Kane were several other private planes, twenty-three in all. Two more were just now landing. Yet another was waiting to land.

  Everyone scheduled for Resurrection was here.

  The chosen ones.

  90

  THEY WERE in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and a few in their eighties.

  All leaders of industry, science, and government from around the world. Power brokers, masters of the universe, legends in their own time.

  All males, every one.

  The chosen ones.

  They wore expensive suits, mostly in dark colors; all but a few disabled ones had proud, straight bearings as they deplaned. They were accustomed to being in command, in full control of the lives around them.

  Ethan Kane watched the men come toward him, and even he was struck by the eeriness of the scene. Actually, the irony of it. That these few men should be saved.

  He and his surgeons were the receiving line, and they greeted each powerful man with the required deference and respect. These men were used to it, expected nothing less, even here, where they came like beggars to a king.

  Dr. Kane lightly took the hand of the current president of the United States, but then hurried him along, effectively dismissing the man.

  Behind the president was someone much more important, more powerful, infinitely more worthy of salvation, the most preeminent scientist from Germany. A genius who was almost on a level with Kane himself.

  And behind him, someone more important still—from mainland China.

  Ethan Kane found it easy to make small talk with each one, and especially to smile at the thirty men. They had been chosen—and so had he.

  They were the last best hope of the world.

  91

  A LOUD GROAN, or possibly a snore, woke me from the deepest and probably creepiest sleep of my life.

  It took me a few seconds to realize that I was the one making the godawful noise. The good news—I was still alive.

  I was visually and aurally disoriented, hardly knew which way to look. Where was I? Then I heard Kit calling softly. He was alive, too. We both were. At the Hospital.

  But why? I wondered. Were we to be used as bargaining leverage? Was that it? It had to be. Kit and I were alive because we might be needed to influence the children in the next few hours. What part were they supposed to play in what was going on? What Max called Resurrection. Why were they so important? The question was driving me crazy.

  “Kit?” I mumbled. “That really you? Or am I dreaming again?”

  “Frannie,” he said. “Frances Jane, it’s me. In the flesh, such as it is. Misery sure loves company.”

  I turned onto my side and I felt as if I were rolling underwater. Oh God! I saw Max first and lazily waggled my fingers at her. Then I turned back to Kit, who was in a cage catercorner to mine.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Liberty Hospital,” he whispered. “We couldn’t get a private room.”

  Right. In steel cages used for lab animals. Waiting for Resurrection, whatever that was.

  And I was also coming out of a morphine stupor.

  “You okay?” Kit asked me. “Within reason?”

  “I don’t know,” I said languidly. “My head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds. You?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t remedy with one clear shot at Dr. Ethan Kane. Something’s going on out there. That’s why they’re not paying attention to us for the moment.”

  Max called out to us from across the room. She was in a rage. “I have to get out of here. I’m going to go break Dr. Kane’s neck. That’s a promise I made to Ozymandias.”

  “Calm down, Max,” I cal
led to her. Then I rattled my bars for the hell of it.

  We were in KennelPal cages, a brand I used myself, and I was quite familiar with this type of enclosure. To open it, you had to pinch two spring-loaded prongs together to cause a bolt to slide out of its sleeve. There was a heavy metal plate behind the latch, so it was impossible to squeeze the prongs from inside the cage. No one could do it. Thus the guards outside rather than in here with us. We were trapped.

  I watched Max mentally work quickly through all the possibilities. She was frustrated, livid. But she wasn’t giving up.

  “Frannie, you ever read The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay? There was a character called the Escapist,” she called from her cage.

  “Max, what are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Getting the hell out of here. Trying, anyway.”

  I almost couldn’t believe what I saw next. This was Max at her best.

  I watched her spread the bars of her cage wide enough for her hand to go through. She had incredible strength. Off the charts. Sometimes I forgot about that.

  She pinched the prongs together. The bolt instantly sprang loose from its metal sleeve and Max swung the door free.

  “I’m a strong girl and my IQ is off the charts,” she said with a note of defiance that made my heart sing.

  There were footsteps out in the hall and it sounded as though people were coming our way. In a hurry.

  “Let me take care of this,” said Max. “It’ll be a pleasure.” She started toward the steel-framed door.

  “Max, come back here!” I yelled. “Don’t go out there.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Max said.

  Then she yanked open the door and disappeared outside.

  There were three shots and my heart sank. Max screamed. Then nothing. Not a sound for several seconds.

  The door to the outside finally flew open. Several doctors rushed into the room where we were being held.