Terminal (A Medical Thriller)

March 7

Sunday, 2:30 P.M.

As soon as Dr. Mason pulled into the Forbes parking lot, Sean tried to peer into the research building foyer to see if anything had changed since he’d left. With sunlight reflecting off the windows, it was impossible to see in. Sean couldn’t tell if another guard had come on duty or not.

It was only after they’d parked, and Sean entered the building, keeping the Masons close ahead, that he saw another guard had indeed come on duty. The man’s ID badge read “Sanchez.”

“Tell him who you are and ask for his pass keys,” Sean whispered as the trio neared the turnstile.

“He knows who I am,” Dr. Mason snapped.

“Tell him you want no one else in the building until we come down,” Sean said. He knew such a command would be ignored as the afternoon progressed, but he thought he might as well try.

Dr. Mason did as he was told. He passed the large key ring to Sean as soon as Sanchez had given it to him. The guard eyed them strangely as they went through the turnstile. Big-breasted blondes wearing black bikinis and feathered high heels weren’t exactly regulars at the Forbes research building.

“Your brother was right,” Dr. Mason said after Sean closed and locked the entrance doors beyond the turnstile. “This is a serious felony. You’ll go to prison. You’re not going to get away with this.”

“I told you, I don’t intend to get away with it,” Sean said.

Sean locked the stairwell doors. On the second floor he closed and locked the fire doors leading to the bridge to the hospital. Once they got to the fifth floor he locked off the elevator, then summoned the second car. When it arrived, he locked that off as well.

Ushering the Masons into his lab, Sean waved to Janet. She was inside the glass-enclosed office reading the charts. She came out and looked quizzically at the Masons. Sean hastily introduced them, then sent the Masons into the glass-enclosed office, telling them to stay put. He closed the door behind them.

“What are they doing here?” Janet asked with concern. “And what’s Mrs. Mason doing in a swimsuit? It looks like she’s been crying.”

“She’s a bit hysterical,” Sean explained. “There wasn’t time for her to change. I brought them here to keep others from disturbing me. Besides, as soon as I do what I’m planning on doing, Dr. Mason is the first person I want to tell.”

“Did you force them to come here?” Janet asked. Even after everything else Sean had resorted to, this had to be past the limit.

“They would have preferred to listen to the rest of Aida,” Sean admitted. He began clearing a work area on his bench, particularly under one of the exhaust hoods.

“Did you use that gun you’re carrying?” Janet asked. She didn’t want to hear the answer.

“I had to show it to them,” Sean admitted.

“Heaven help us,” Janet exclaimed, looking up toward the ceiling and shaking her head.

Sean got out some fresh glassware including a large Erlenmeyer flask. He pushed away some of the debris near the sink to make space.

Janet reached out and grasped Sean’s arm. “This whole thing has gone too far,” she said. “You’ve kidnapped the Masons! Do you understand that?”

“Of course,” Sean said. “What do you think, I’m crazy?”

“Don’t make me answer that,” Janet said.

“Did anybody come by while I was gone?” Sean asked.

“Yes,” Janet said. “Robert Harris came like you thought he might.”

“And?” Sean asked, looking up from his work.

“I told him what you told me to say,” Janet replied. “He wanted to know if you’d gone back to the residence. I said I didn’t know. I think he went there to look for you.”

“Perfect,” Sean said. “He’s the one I’m the most afraid of. He’s too gung ho. Everything has to be in place by the time he returns.” Sean went back to work.

Janet didn’t know what to do. She watched Sean for a few minutes as he mixed reagents in the large Erlenmeyer flask, creating a colorless, oily liquid.

“What exactly are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m making a large batch of nitroglycerin,” he said. “Plus an ice bath for it to sit in and cool.”

“You’re joking,” Janet said with fresh concern. It was hard to keep up with Sean.

“You’re right,” Sean said, lowering his voice. “It’s show time. This is really for the benefit of Dr. Mason and his beautiful bride. As a doctor, he knows just enough chemistry to make this believable.”

“Sean, you’re acting bizarre,” Janet said.

“I am a bit manic,” Sean agreed. “By the way, what did you think of those charts?”

“I guess you were right,” Janet said. “Not all the charts had reference to economic status, but those that did indicated that the patients were CEOs or family members of CEOs.”

“All part of the Fortune 500, I’d guess,” Sean said. “What does that make you think?”

“I’m too exhausted to draw conclusions,” Janet said. “But I suppose it’s a strange coincidence.”

Sean laughed. “What do you think the statistical probability would be of that happening by chance?”

“I don’t know enough about statistics to answer that,” Janet said.

Sean held up the flask and swirled the contained solution. “This looks good enough to pass,” he said. “Let’s hope old Doc Mason remembers enough of his inorganic chemistry to be impressed.”

Janet watched Sean carry the flask into the glass enclosure. She wondered if he was losing touch with reality. Granted, he’d been driven to increasingly desperate acts, but abducting the Masons at gunpoint was a mind-numbing quantum leap. The legal consequences of such an act had to be severe. Janet didn’t know much law, but she knew she was implicated to an extent. She doubted Sean’s proposed coercion theory would spare her. She only wished she knew what to do.

Janet watched as Sean presented the fake nitroglycerin to the Masons as the real thing. Judging by the impression he made on Dr. Mason, she garnered that the Forbes director recalled enough of his inorganic chemistry to make the presentation plausible. Dr. Mason’s eyes opened wide. Mrs. Mason brought a hand to her mouth. When Sean gave the flask a violent swirl both the Masons stepped back in fear. Then Sean jammed the flask into the ice bath he’d set up on the desk, collected the charts Janet had left in there, and came out into the lab. He dumped the charts on a nearby lab bench.

“What did the Masons say?” Janet asked.

“They were suitably impressed,” Sean said. “Especially when I told them the freezing point is only fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit and that the stuff is extraordinarily unstable in a solid form. I told them to be careful in there because bumping the table would detonate it.”

“I think we should call this whole thing off,” Janet said. “You’re going too far.”

“I beg to differ,” Sean said. “Besides, it’s me that’s doing this, not you.”

“I’m involved,” Janet said. “Just being here probably makes me an accessory.”

“When all is said and done, Brian will work it out,” Sean said. “Trust me.”

Janet’s attention was caught by the couple in the glass office. “You shouldn’t have left the Masons alone,” Janet said. “Dr. Mason is making a call.”

“Good,” Sean said. “I fully expected him to call someone. In fact, I hope he calls the police. You see, I want a circus around here.”

Janet stared at Sean. For the first time, she thought he might be experiencing a psychotic break. “Sean,” she said gently, “I have a feeling that you’re decompensating. Maybe you’ve been under too much pressure.”

“Seriously,” Sean said. “I want a carnival atmosphere. It will be much safer. The last thing I want is some frustrated commando like Robert Harris crawling around through the air ducts with a knife in his mouth trying to be a hero. That’s when people would get hurt. I want the police and the fire department out there scratching their heads but keeping the would-be paladins at bay. I want them to think I’m crazy for four hours or so.”

“I don’t understand you,” Janet said.

“You will,” Sean assured her. “Meanwhile, I got some work for you to do. You told me you know something about computers. Head up to administration on the seventh floor.” He handed her the ring of pass keys. “Go into that glass room that we saw when we copied the charts, the one where the computer was running that program, flashing those nine-digit numbers. I think those numbers are social security numbers. And the phone numbers! I think those were numbers for insurance companies that write health insurance. See if you can corroborate that. Then see if you can hack your way into the Forbes mainframe. I want you to look for travel files for the clinic, especially for Deborah Levy and Margaret Richmond.”

“Can’t you tell me why I’m doing this?” Janet asked.

“No,” Sean said. “It’s like a double blind study. I want you to be objective.”

Sean’s mania was oddly compelling—and persuasive. Janet took the keys and walked to the stairwell. Sean gave her a thumbs-up in parting. Whatever the resolution of this madcap, reckless escapade would be, she’d know within four or five hours.

Before he got down to work, Sean picked up a telephone and called Brian’s number in Boston and left a long message. First he apologized for hitting him. Then he said that in case something happened to go horribly wrong, he wanted to tell him what he believed was happening at the Forbes Cancer Center. It took him about five minutes.

LIEUTENANT HECTOR Salazar of the Miami Police Department normally used Sunday afternoons as an opportunity to finish the reams of paperwork generated by Miami’s typically busy Saturday nights. Sundays were generally quiet. Auto accidents, which the uniformed patrol and their sergeants could handle, comprised the biggest portion of the day’s workload. Later on Sundays, after the football games were over, domestic violence often flared. Sometimes that could involve the watch commander, so Hector wanted to get as much done as he could before the phone started to ring.

Knowing that the Miami Dolphins game was still in progress, Hector answered the phone at three-fifteen with little concern. The call was patched through the complaint room to a land line.

“Sergeant Anderson here,” the voice said. “I’m at the Forbes Cancer Center hospital building. We got a problem.”

“What is it?” Hector asked. His chair squeaked as he leaned back.

“We got a guy holed up in the research building next door with two, maybe three hostages,” Anderson said. “He’s armed. There’s also a bomb of some kind involved.”

“Christ!” Hector said as his chair tipped forward with a thump. From experience, he knew the paperwork this kind of scene could generate. “Anyone else in the building?”

“We don’t think so,” Anderson said. “At least not according to the guard. To make matters worse, the hostages are VIPs. It’s the director of the center, Dr. Randolph Mason, and his wife, Sarah Mason.”

“You have the area secured?” Hector asked. His mind was already jumping ahead. This operation would be a hot potato. Dr. Randolph Mason was well known in the Miami area.

“We’re doing it now,” Anderson said. “We’re running yellow crime scene tape around the whole building.”

“Any media yet?” Hector asked. Sometimes the media got to a scene faster than backup police personnel. The media often monitored the police radio bands.

“Not yet,” Anderson said. “That’s why I’m using this land line. But we expect a blizzard any minute. The hostage taker’s name is Sean Murphy. He’s a medical student working at the clinic. He’s with a nurse named Janet Reardon. We don’t know if she’s an accomplice or a hostage.”

“What do you mean by ‘some kind of bomb’?” Hector asked.

“He mixed up a big flask of nitroglycerin,” Anderson said. “It’s standing in ice on a desk in the room with the hostages. Once it freezes, slamming the door can set it off. At least, that’s what Dr. Mason said.”

“You’ve talked with the hostages?” Hector asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Anderson said. “Dr. Mason told me he and his wife are in a glass office along with the nitro. They’re terrified, but so far they’re unharmed and they have a phone. He says he can see the perp. But the girl is gone. He doesn’t know where she went.”

“What’s Murphy doing?” Hector asked. “Has he made any demands yet?”

“No demands yet,” Anderson said. “Apparently he’s real busy doing some kind of experiment.”

“What do you mean experiment?” Hector asked.

“No clue,” Anderson said. “I’m just repeating what Dr. Mason said. Apparently Murphy had been disgruntled because he’d been denied permission to work on a particular project. Maybe he’s working on that. At any rate, he’s armed. Dr. Mason said he waved the gun in front of them when he broke into their home.”

“What kind of gun?”

“Sounds like a .38 detective special, from Dr. Mason’s description,” Anderson said.

“Make sure the building is secure,” Hector said. “I want no one going in or out. Got it?”

“Got it,” Anderson said.

After telling Anderson that he’d be out on site in a few minutes. Hector made three calls. First he called the hostage negotiating team and spoke with the supervisor, Ronald Hunt. Next he called the shift SWAT team commander, George Loring. Finally he called Phil Darell, the bomb squad supervisor. Hector told all three to assemble their respective teams and to rendezvous at the Forbes Cancer Center ASAP.

Hector heaved his two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame out of the desk chair. He was a stocky man who’d been all muscle during his twenties. During his early thirties, a lot of that muscle had turned to fat. Using his stubby, shovel-like hands, he attached to his belt the police paraphernalia he’d removed to sit at his desk. He was in the process of slipping into his Kevlar vest when the phone rang again. It was the chief, Mark Witman.

“I understand there’s a hostage situation,” Chief Witman said.

“Yes, sir,” Hector stammered. “I was just called. We’re mobilizing the necessary personnel.”

“You feel comfortable handling this?” Chief Witman said.

“Yes, sir,” Hector answered.

“You sure you don’t want a captain running the show?” Chief Witman asked.

“I believe there’ll be no problem, sir,” Hector said.

“Okay,” Chief Witman said. “But I must tell you I have already had a call from the mayor. This is a politically sensitive situation.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” Hector said.

“I want this handled by the book,” Chief Witman said.

“Yes, sir,” Hector said.

SEAN ATTACKED his work with determination. Knowing that his time was limited, he tried to work efficiently, planning each step in advance. The first thing he did was slip up to the sixth floor to check on the automatic peptide analyzer that he’d set up on Saturday to sequence the amino acids. He thought there was a good chance his run had been disturbed since Deborah Levy had appeared to read him the riot act just after he’d started it. But the machine hadn’t been touched, and his sample was still inside. He tore off the readout from the printer.

The next thing Sean did was carry two thermal cyclers down from the sixth floor to the fifth. They were going to be his workhorses for the afternoon. It was in the thermal cyclers that the polymerase chain reactions were carried out.

After a quick check on the Masons, who seemed to be spending most of their time arguing over whose fault it was that they’d been taken hostage, Sean got down to real work.

First he went over the readout from the peptide analyzer. The results were dramatic. The amino acid sequences of the antigen binding sites of Helen Cabot’s medicine and Louis Martin’s medicine were identical. The immunoglobulins were the same, meaning all the medulloblastoma patients were being treated, at least initially, with the same antibody. This information was consistent with Sean’s theory, so it fanned his excitement.

Next, Sean got out Helen’s brain and the syringe containing her cerebrospinal fluid from the refrigerator. He took another general sample of tumor from the brain, then returned the organ to the refrigerator. After cutting it into small pieces, Sean put the tumor sample in a flask with the appropriate enzymes to create a cell suspension of the cancer cells. He put the flask in the incubator.

While the enzymes worked on the tumor sample, Sean began loading some of the ninety-six wells of the first thermal cycler with aliquots of Helen’s cerebrospinal fluid. To each well of cerebrospinal fluid he added an enzyme called a reverse transcriptase to change any viral RNA to DNA. Then he put the paired primers for St. Louis encephalitis virus into the same well. Finally, he added the reagents to sustain the polymerase chain reaction. These reagents included a heat stable enzyme called Taq.

Turning back to the cell suspension of Helen’s cancer, Sean used a detergent designated NP-40 to open the cells and their nuclear membranes. Then, by painstaking separation techniques, he isolated the cellular nucleoproteins from the rest of the cellular debris. In a final step he separated the DNA from the RNA.

He loaded samples of the DNA into the remaining wells of the first thermal cycler. Into these same wells Sean carefully added the paired primers for oncogenes, a separate pair for each well. Finally he dosed each well with an appropriate amount of reagents for the polymerase chain reaction.

With the first thermal cycler fully loaded, Sean turned it on.

Turning to the second thermal cycler, Sean added samples of Helen’s tumor cell RNA to each well. In the second run he was planning to look for messenger RNA made from oncogenes. To do this he had to add aliquots of reverse transcriptions to each well, the same enzyme that he’d added to the samples of cerebrospinal fluid. While he was in the tedious process of adding the oncogene primer pairs, a pair in each well, the phone rang.

At first Sean ignored the phone, assuming that Dr. Mason would answer it. When Mason failed to do so, the continuous ringing began to grate on Sean’s nerves. Putting down the pipette he was using, Sean walked over to the glass-enclosed office. Mrs. Mason was sitting glumly in an office chair pushed into the corner. She’d apparently cried herself out and was just sniffling into a tissue. Dr. Mason was nervously watching the flask in the ice bath, concerned that the ringing phone might disturb it.

Sean pushed open the door. “Would you mind answering the phone?” Sean said irritably. “Whoever it is, be sure to tell them that the nitroglycerin is just on the verge of freezing.”

Sean gave the door a shove. As it clunked into its jamb, Sean could see Dr. Mason wince, but the doctor obediently picked up the receiver. Sean turned back to his lab bench and his pipetting. He’d only loaded a single well when his concentration was again broken.

“It’s a Lieutenant Hector Salazar from the Miami Police Department,” Dr. Mason called. “He’d like to talk with you.”

Sean looked over at the office. Dr. Mason had the door propped open with his foot. He was holding the phone in one hand, the receiver in the other. The cord snaked back into the office.

“Tell him that there will be no problems if they wait for a couple more hours,” Sean said.

Dr. Mason spoke into the phone for a few moments, then called out: “He insists on talking with you.”

Sean rolled his eyes. He put his pipette back down on the lab bench, stepped over to the wall extension, and pushed the blinking button.

“I’m very busy right now,” he said without preamble.

“Take it easy,” Hector said soothingly. “I know you’re upset, but everything is going to work out fine. There’s someone here who’d like to have a word with you. His name is Sergeant Hunt. We want to be reasonable about all this. I’m sure you do too.”

Sean tried to protest that he didn’t have time for conversation when Sergeant Hunt’s gruff voice came over the line.

“Now I want you to stay calm,” Sergeant Hunt said.

“That’s a little difficult,” Sean said. “I’ve got a lot to do in a short time.”

“No one will get hurt,” Sergeant Hunt said. “We’d like you to come down here so we can talk.”

“Sorry,” Sean said.

“I’ve heard that you’ve been angry about not being able to work on a particular project,” Sergeant Hunt said. “Let’s talk about it. I can understand how upsetting that might be. You may want to lash out at the people you think are responsible. But we should also talk about the fact that holding people against their will is a serious offense.”

Sean smiled when he realized the police had surmised he’d taken the Masons hostage as a result of being kept off the medulloblastoma protocol. In a way, they weren’t far off.

“I appreciate your concern and your presence,” Sean said. “But I don’t have a lot of time to talk. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Just tell us what you want,” Sergeant Hunt said.

“Time,” Sean said. “I only want a little time. Two or three, or perhaps four hours at most.”

Sean hung up. Returning to his bench, he lifted his pipette and went back to work.

RONALD HUNT was a six-foot redheaded man. At thirty-seven, he’d been on the police force for fifteen years, ever since graduating from community college. His major had been law enforcement, but he’d minored in psychology. Attempting to combine psychology with police work, he’d jumped at the chance to join the Hostage Negotiating Team when a slot became available. Although he didn’t get to use his skills as often as he would have liked, when he did he’d enjoyed the challenge. He’d even been inspired to take more psychology at night school at the University of Miami.

Sergeant Hunt had been successful in all his previous operations and had developed confidence in his abilities. After the successful resolution of the last episode which involved a discontented employee at a soft-drink bottling plant who’d taken three female colleagues hostage, Ronald had received a citation from the force for meritorious service. So when Sean Murphy hung up on him, it was a blow to his ego.

“The twerp hung up on me!” Ron said indignantly.

“What did he say he wanted?” Hector asked.

“Time,” Ron said.

“What do you mean, time?” Hector asked. “Like the magazine? Does he want to be in Time?”

“No,” Ron said. “Time like hours. He told me he has to get back to work. He must be working on that project he’d been forbidden to work on.”

“What kind of project?” Hector asked.

“I don’t know,” Ron said. He then pushed the redial on the portable phone. “I can’t negotiate unless we talk.”

Lieutenant Hector Salazar and Sergeant Ronald Hunt were standing behind three blue-and-white Miami police cars parked in the Forbes parking lot directly across from the entrance to the Forbes research building. The squad cars were parked in the form of a letter U facing away from the building. In the heart of this U they’d set up a mini-command center with a couple of phones and a radio on a folding card table.

The police presence at the site had swelled considerably. Initially there had only been four officers: the original two uniformed patrolmen who’d answered the call, plus their sergeant and his partner. Now there was a small crowd. Besides dozens of regular uniformed police, including Hector, there was the two-man negotiating team, a five-man bomb squad, and a ten-man SWAT team dressed in black assault uniforms. The SWAT team was off to the side warming up with some jumping jacks.

In addition to the police, Forbes was represented by Dr. Deborah Levy, Margaret Richmond, and Robert Harris. They had been allowed near the command post but had been asked to keep to the side. A small crowd, including local media, had gathered just beyond the yellow crime scene tape. Several TV vans were parked as close as possible with their antennae extended. Reporters with microphones in hand and camera crews at their heels were scouring the crowd to interview anyone who seemed to have any information about the drama transpiring within.

While the crowd of spectators swelled, the police tried to go about their business.

“Dr. Mason says that Murphy flat out refuses to get back on the phone,” Ron said. He was clearly offended.

“You keep trying,” Hector advised him. Turning to Sergeant Anderson, Hector said: “I trust that all entrances and exits are covered.”

“All covered,” Anderson assured him. “No one is going in or coming out without our knowing it. Plus we have sharp-shooters on the roof of the hospital.”

“What about that pedestrian bridge connecting the two buildings?” Hector asked.

“We got a man on the bridge on the hospital side,” Anderson said. “There aren’t going to be any surprises in this operation.”

Hector motioned to Phil Darell to come over. “What’s the story on the bomb?” Hector asked.

“It’s a little unorthodox,” Phil acknowledged. “I spoke with the doctor. It’s a flask of nitroglycerin. He estimates about two or three hundred cc’s. It’s sitting in an ice bath. Apparently Murphy comes in every so often and dumps ice into the bath. Every time he does it, it terrifies the doctor.”

“Is it a problem?” Hector asked.

“Yeah, it’s a problem,” Phil said. “Especially once it solidifies.”

“Would slamming a door detonate it?” Hector asked.

“Probably not,” Phil replied. “But a shake might. A fall to the floor certainly would.”

“But can you handle it?”

“Absolutely,” Phil said.

Next Hector waved Deborah Levy over.

“I understand you run the research here.”

Dr. Levy nodded.

“What do you think this kid is doing?” Hector asked. “He told our negotiator he wanted time to work.”

“Work!” Dr. Levy said disparagingly. “He’s probably up there sabotaging our research. He’s been angry that we haven’t allowed him to work on one of our protocols. He has no respect for anyone or anything. Frankly, I thought he was disturbed from the first moment I met him.”

“Can he be working on that protocol now?” Hector asked.

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Levy said. “That protocol has moved into clinical trials.”

“So you think he’s up there causing trouble,” Hector said.

“I know that he is causing trouble!” Dr. Levy said. “I think you should go up there and drag him out.”

“We have the safety of the hostages to consider,” Hector said.

Hector was about to confer with George Loring and his SWAT team when one of the uniformed patrolmen got his attention.

“This man insists on talking with you. Lieutenant,” the patrolman said. “He claims to be the brother of the guy who’s holed up inside.”

Brian introduced himself. He explained that he was a lawyer from Boston.

“Any insight into what’s going on here?” Hector asked.

“No, I’m sorry,” Brian said. “But I know my brother. Although he’s always been headstrong, he would not do anything like this unless there was a damn good reason. I want to be sure that you people don’t do anything rash.”

“Taking hostages at gunpoint and threatening them with a bomb is more than headstrong,” Hector said. “That kind of behavior puts him in an unstable, unpredictable, and dangerous category. We have to proceed on that basis.”

“I admit what he’s done here appears foolhardy,” Brian said. “But Sean’s ultimately rational. Maybe you should let me talk to him.”

“You think he might listen to you?” Hector asked.

“I think so,” Brian said, despite still feeling the effects of the episode at the Masons’.

Hector got the phone away from Ronald Hunt and let Brian try calling. Unfortunately no one answered, not even Dr. Mason.

“The doctor has been answering until a few minutes ago,” Ron said.

“Let me go in and talk with him,” Brian said.

Hector shook his head. “There are enough hostages in there as it is,” he said.

“Lieutenant Salazar,” a voice called. Hector turned to see a tall, slender Caucasian approaching, along with a bearded, powerfully built Afro-American. Sterling introduced himself and Wayne Edwards. “I’m acquainted with your chief, Mark Witman, quite well,” Sterling said after the introductions. Then he added: “We heard about this situation involving Sean Murphy so we came to offer our services.”

“This is a police matter,” Hector said. He eyed the new-comers with suspicion. He never liked anyone who tried to bully him by saying he was bosom buddies with the chief. He wondered how they’d managed to cross the crime scene barrier.

“My colleague and I have been following Mr. Murphy for several days,” Sterling explained. “We are in the temporary employ of the Forbes Cancer Center.”

“You have some explanation of what’s going on here?” Hector asked.

“We know that this dude’s been getting progressively crazy,” Wayne said.

“He’s not crazy!” Brian said, interrupting. “Sean is brash and imprudent, but he’s not crazy.”

“If someone does a string of crazy things,” Wayne said, “it’s fair to say he’s crazy.”

At that moment everyone ducked reflexively as a helicopter swept over the building, then hovered over the parking lot. The thunderous thump of the rotor blades rattled everyone’s ribcage. Every bit of dust and dirt smaller than medium-sized gravel became airborne. A few papers on the card table were swept away.

George Loring, commander of the SWAT team, came forward. “That’s our chopper,” he yelled into Hector’s ear. The noise of the aircraft was deafening. “I called it over so we can get to the roof the moment you give the green light.”

Hector was having trouble keeping his hat on. “For crissake, George,” he screamed back. “Tell the goddamn chopper to move off until we call it.”

“Yes, sir!” George yelled back. He pulled a small microphone clipped to one of his epaulets. Shielding it with his hands he spoke briefly to the pilot. To everyone’s relief the chopper dipped, then swept away to land on a helipad next to the hospital.

“What’s your take on this situation?” Hector asked George now that they could talk.

“I looked at the floor plans supplied by the head of security, who’s been very cooperative,” George said, pointing out Robert Harris for Hector. “I think we’d only need a six-man team on the roof: three down each stairwell. The suspect’s in the fifth-floor lab. We’d only need one, but we’d probably go ahead and use two concussion grenades. It would be over in seconds. A piece of cake.”

“What about the nitroglycerin in the office?” Hector asked.

“I didn’t hear about any nitro,” George said.

“It’s in a glass-enclosed office,” Hector said.

“It would be a risk,” Phil interrupted, having overheard the conversation. “The concussive waves could detonate the nitroglycerin if it’s in a solid state.”

“Hell, then,” George said. “Forget the grenades. We can just come out of both stairwells simultaneously. The terrorist wouldn’t know what hit him.”

“Sean’s no terrorist!” Brian said, horrified at this talk.

“I’d like to volunteer to be with the assault team,” Harris said, speaking up for the first time. “I know the terrain.”

“This is not amateur hour,” Hector said.

“I’m no amateur,” Harris said indignantly. “I trained as a commando in the service and carried out a number of commando missions in Desert Storm.”

“I think something should be done sooner rather than later,” Dr. Levy said. “The longer that crazy kid is left up there, the more damage he can do to our ongoing experiments.”

Everyone ducked again as another helicopter made a low pass over the parking area. This one had “Channel 4 TV” on its side.

Hector yelled for Anderson to call the complaint room to have them call Channel 4 to get their goddamn helicopter away from the scene or he’d let the SWAT team have a go at it with their automatic weapons.

Despite the noise and general pandemonium, Brian picked up one of the telephones and pressed the redial button. He prayed it would be answered, and it was. But it wasn’t Sean. It was Dr. Mason.

SEAN HAD no idea how many cycles he should let the thermal cyclers run. All he was looking for was a positive reaction in any of the approximately one hundred and fifty wells he’d prepared. Impatient, he stopped the first machine after twenty-five cycles and removed the tray containing the wells.

First he added a biotinylated probe and the enzymatic reagents used to detect whether the probe had reacted in the series of wells containing Helen Cabot’s cerebrospinal fluid. Then he introduced these samples into the chemiluminescence instrument and waited by the printout to see if there was any luminescence.

To Sean’s surprise, the very first sample was positive. Although he fully expected it to be positive eventually, he hadn’t expected a reaction so soon. What this established was that Helen Cabot—just like Malcolm Betencourt—had contracted St. Louis encephalitis in the middle of the winter, which was strange since the normal vector for the illness is a mosquito.

Sean then turned his attention to the other wells where he would be searching for the presence of oncogenes. But before he could start adding the appropriate probes, he was interrupted by Dr. Mason.

Although the phone had rung intermittently after he’d spoken with Sergeant Hunt, Sean had ignored it. Apparently Dr. Mason had ignored it too, because on several occasions it rang for extended periods. Sean had finally turned the ringer off on his extension. But apparently it had rung again and apparently this time Dr. Mason had answered it because he’d gingerly opened the door to tell Sean that his brother was on the line.

Although Sean hated to interrupt what he was doing, he felt guilty enough about Brian to take his call. The first thing he did was apologize for striking him.

“I’m willing to forgive and forget,” Brian said. “But you have to end this nonsense right now and come down here and give yourself up.”

“I can’t,” Sean said. “I need another hour or so, maybe two at the most.”

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Brian asked.

“It’ll take too long to explain,” Sean said. “But it’s big stuff.”

“I’m afraid you have no idea of the hullabaloo you’re causing,” Brian said. “They’ve got everyone here but the National Guard. You’ve gone too far this time. If you don’t come out this minute and put a stop to this, I won’t have anything to do with you.”

“I only need a little more time,” Sean said. “I’m not asking for the world.”

“There’s a bunch of gung ho nuts out here,” Brian said. “They’re talking about storming the building.”

“Make sure they know about the purported nitroglycerin,” Sean said. “That’s supposed to dissuade them from heroics.”

“What do you mean, ‘purported nitroglycerin’?” Brian asked.

“It’s mostly ethanol with just a little acetone,” Sean said. “It looks like nitroglycerin. At least, it’s close enough to fool Dr. Mason. You didn’t think I’d make up a batch of the real thing, did you?”

“At this point,” Brian said, “I wouldn’t put anything past you.”

“Just talk them out of any commando action,” Sean said. “Get me at least one more hour.

Sean could hear Brian continue to protest, but Sean didn’t listen. Instead he hung up the phone and turned back to the first thermal cycler tray.

Sean hadn’t gotten far with the oncogene probes when Janet came through the stairwell door trailing computer printout sheets.

“No problem finding the Forbes travel file,” she said. She thrust the computer paper at Sean. “For whatever it’s worth, Dr. Deborah Levy does a lot of traveling, but it’s mostly back and forth to Key West.”

Sean glanced at the printout. “She does keep on the move,” he agreed. “But notice all these other cities. That’s what I expected. What about Margaret Richmond?”

“No travel to Key West,” Janet said. “But moderate travel around the country. About once a month she’s off to another city.”

“What about that automated program we saw?” Sean asked.

“You were right about that,” Janet said. “It was running when I got up there, so I copied two of the numbers we thought might have been phone numbers. When I tried to call direct I could tell it was a computer link, so I used the mainframe and its modem to connect. Both of them were insurance companies: one was Medi-First; the other was Healthnet.”

“Bingo,” Sean said. “It’s all falling into place.”

“How about letting me in on the revelation,” Janet said.

“What I’d be willing to bet is that the computer searches for medical insurance companies’ precertification files for specific social security numbers. It probably does it on a nightly basis during the week and on Sunday afternoons.”

“You mean precertification for surgery?” Janet asked.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Sean said. “In an attempt to cut down on unnecessary surgery, most if not all health plans require the doctor or the hospital to notify the insurance company of proposed surgery in advance. Usually it’s merely a rubber-stamp exercise so it’s pretty casual. I doubt there’s any concern about confidentiality. That computer upstairs is printing out proposed elective surgery on a specific list of social security numbers.”

“Those are the numbers that are flashing on the screen,” Janet said.

“That’s what it has to be,” Sean said.

“So why?” Janet asked.

“I’ll let you figure that out,” Sean said. “While I continue processing these thermal cycler samples, you look at the referring histories on these thirty-three charts we copied. I think you’ll find most will mention that the patient had elective surgery within a relatively short period before their diagnosis of medulloblastoma. I want you to compare the dates of those surgeries with Dr. Levy’s travel schedule.”

Janet stared at Sean without blinking. Despite her exhaustion, she was beginning to assimilate the facts as Sean understood them and therefore starting to comprehend the direction Sean’s thoughts were headed. Without saying another word, she sat down with the charts and the computer printout she’d brought down from the seventh floor.

Turning back to his own work, Sean loaded a few more wells with the appropriate oncogene probes. He hadn’t gotten far when Dr. Mason interrupted him.

“My wife is getting hungry,” Dr. Mason announced.

With his general fatigue Sean’s nerves were raw. After all that had happened he could not abide the Masons, particularly Mrs. Mason. The fact that they thought it appropriate to bother him with her being hungry threw him into a momentary rage. Putting down the pipette, he raced back toward the glass office.

Dr. Mason saw Sean coming and quickly guessed his state of mind. He let go of the door and backed into the office.

Sean threw open the office door so that it banged against the doorstop. He flew into the office, snatched the Erlenmeyer flask from the ice bath, and gave it a shake. Some of its contents had solidified and cakes of ice clunked against the sides of the container.

Dr. Mason’s face blanched as he cringed in anticipation of an explosion. Mrs. Mason buried her face in her hands.

“If I hear one more sound from you people I’m going to come in here and shatter this flask on the floor,” Sean yelled.

When no explosion occurred Dr. Mason opened his eyes. Mrs. Mason peeked out between her fingers.

“Do you people understand?” Sean snapped.

Dr. Mason swallowed hard, then nodded.

Disgusted with the Masons and his own temper tantrum, Sean went back to his lab bench. Guiltily he glanced over at Janet, but she’d not paid any attention. She was too engrossed in the charts.

Picking up the pipette, Sean went back to work. It was not easy, and he had to concentrate. He had to put the right probe in the right well, and he had the primer pairs and probes for over forty oncogenes, a rather extensive list.

A number of the first samples were negative. Sean didn’t know if he’d taken them from the thermal cycler after an insufficient number of cycles or if they were truly negative. By the fifth sample he was beginning to become discouraged. For the first time since he’d put this drama into motion, he seriously questioned the conclusions which by then he’d come to view as rock solid. But then the sixth sample proved positive. He’d detected the presence of an oncogene known by the designation ERB-2, which referred to avian erythroblastosis virus, a virus whose normal host was chickens.

By the time Janet finished with the charts, Sean had found another oncogene, called v-myc, which stood for myelocytoma virus, another virus that grew in chickens.

“Only about three-quarters of the charts have the surgery dates,” Janet said. “But of those, most of them match the dates and destinations of Dr. Levy’s travel.”

“Hallelujah!” Sean exclaimed. “It’s all fitting into place like a jigsaw puzzle.”

“What I don’t understand,” Janet said, “is what she did in those cities.”

“Nearly everyone who’s post-surgery is on an IV,” Sean said. “It keeps people hydrated, plus if there’s a problem the medical staff has a route for medication. My guess is that Deborah Levy gave them an injection into their IV.”

“Of what?” Janet asked.

“An injection of St. Louis encephalitis virus,” Sean said. He told Janet about the positive test for the SLE virus in Helen Cabot’s cerebrospinal fluid. He also told her that Louis Martin had had transient neurological symptoms similar to Helen’s several days after his elective surgery.

“And if you look back at the charts,” Sean continued, “I think you’ll find most of these people had similar fleeting symptoms.”

“Why didn’t they get full-blown encephalitis?” Janet asked. “Especially if it was injected through their IVs?”

“That’s the truly clever part about all this,” Sean said. “I believe the encephalitis viruses were altered and attenuated with the inclusion of viral oncogenes. I’ve already detected two such oncogenes in Helen’s tumor. My guess is that I’ll find another. One of the current theories on cancer is that it takes at least three isolated events in a cell to make it cancerous.”

“How did all this occur to you?” Janet asked. It sounded too complicated, too involved, too complex, and most of all too hideous, to be true.

“Gradually,” Sean said. “Unfortunately it took me a long time. I suppose initially my index of suspicion was so low; it’s the last thing I expected. But when you told me they started immunotherapy with a specific agent from day one, I thought something was out of whack. That flew in the face of everything I knew about the specificity of immunotherapy. It takes time to develop an antibody and everybody’s tumor is antigenically unique.”

“But it was at the Betencourts’ that you started acting strangely,” Janet said.

“Malcolm Betencourt was the one who emphasized the sequence,” Sean said. “Elective surgery, followed by neurological symptoms, and then brain tumor. Helen Cabot and Louis Martin had the same progression. Until I heard Malcolm’s story, I hadn’t realized its significance. As one of my medicine professors said, if you are painstakingly careful in your history-taking, you should be able to make every diagnosis.”

“So you believe the Forbes Cancer Center has been going around the country giving people cancer,” Janet said, forcing herself to put into words her awful fear.

“A very special kind of cancer,” Sean said. “One of the viral oncogenes I’ve detected makes a protein that sticks out through the cell membrane. Since it’s homologous to the protein that forms the receptor for growth hormone, it acts like a switch in the ‘on’ position to encourage cell growth and cell division. But besides that, the portion that sticks through the cell is a peptide and probably antigenic. My guess is the immunoglobulin they give these people is an antibody for that extracellular part of the ERB-2 oncoprotein.”

“You’re losing me,” Janet admitted.

“Let’s give it a try,” Sean said. “Maybe I can show you. It will only take a moment since I have some of the ERB-2 oncoprotein from the Key West lab. Let’s see if Helen Cabot’s medicine reacts with it. Remember that I wasn’t able to get it to react with any natural cellular antigen. The only thing it would react with was her tumor.”

As Sean quickly prepared the immunofluorescence test, Janet tried to absorb what Sean had said so far.

“In other words,” Janet said after a pause, “what makes this medulloblastoma cancer so different is that not only is it manmade, it’s curable.”

Sean looked up from his work with obvious admiration. “Right on!” he said. “You got it. They created a cancer with a tumor-specific antigen for which they already had a monoclonal antibody. This antibody would react with the antigen and coat all the cancer cells. Then all they’d have to do was to stimulate the immune system both in vivo and in vitro to get as many ‘killer’ cells as possible. The only minor problem was that the treatment probably made the symptoms worse initially because of the inflammation it would undoubtedly cause.”

“Which is why Helen Cabot died,” Janet said.

“That’s what I’d guess,” Sean said. “Boston kept her too long during the diagnostic stage. They should have sent her right down to Miami. The trouble is that Boston can’t believe someone else might be better for any medical problem.”

“How could you be so sure of all this?” Janet asked. “By the time we got back here you hadn’t any proof. Yet you were sure enough to force the Masons over here by gunpoint. Seems to me you were taking a huge risk.”

“The clincher was some engineer-style drawings of viral capsids I saw in the lab in Key West,” Sean explained. “As soon as I saw them, I knew it all had to be true. You see, Dr. Levy’s particular area of expertise is virology. The drawings were of a spherical virus with icosahedral symmetry. That’s the kind of capsule an SLE virus has. The scientifically elegant part of this vile plot is that Deborah Levy was able to package the oncogenes into the SLE viral capsule. There wouldn’t be room for more than one oncogene in each virus because she’d have to leave much of the SLE virus genome intact so that it would still be infective. I don’t know how she did it. She also must have included some retroviral genes as well as the oncogene in order to get the oncogene to insert into the infected cell’s chromosomes. My guess is that she transformed a number of the viruses with the oncogenes and only those brain cells that were unlucky enough to get all the oncogenes simultaneously became cancerous.”

“Why an encephalitis virus?” Janet asked.

“It has a natural predilection for neurons,” Sean said. “If they wanted to cause a cancer they could treat, they needed a tumor which they could count on giving early symptoms. Brain cancer is one of them. Scientifically, it’s all quite rational.”

“Diabolical is a better term,” Janet said.

Janet glanced over into the glass-enclosed office. Dr. Mason was pacing the room although carefully avoiding the desk and the flask in the ice bath. “Do you think he knows all this?” she asked.

“That I don’t know,” Sean said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say yes. It would be hard to run this elaborate operation without the director knowing. After all, it was a fund-raiser in the final analysis.”

“That’s why they targeted CEOs and their families,” Janet said.

“That’s my assumption,” Sean said. “It’s easy to find out which health insurance company a large firm uses. It’s also not difficult to find out someone’s social security number, especially for quasi-public figures. Once they had the subscriber’s social security number, it would be an easy step to get their dependents’.”

“So that evening when we were here copying the charts and heard the word donor, they were referring to money, not organs.”

Sean nodded. “At that moment our imaginations were too active,” he said. “We forgot that specialty hospitals and associated research centers have become increasingly desperate as NIH grants are getting harder and harder to come by. Creating a group of wealthy, grateful patients is a good way to make it through to the twenty-first century.”

Meanwhile, the immunofluorescence test involving the ERB-2 and Helen Cabot’s medicine had registered strongly positive, even stronger than it had with the tumor cells. “There you go!” Sean said smugly. “There’s the antigen-antibody reaction I’ve been searching for.”

Next Sean turned back to his hundreds of samples in the two thermocyclers.

“Can I help?” Janet asked.

“Definitely,” Sean said. He showed her how to handle a twelve-channel pipette, then gave her a series of oncogene probes to add to the thermocycler wells.

They worked together for almost three-quarters of an hour, concentrating on the meticulous work. They were both physically exhausted and emotionally overwrought from the magnitude of the conspiracy they suspected. After the final well was probed and analyzed for its luminescence, they’d uncovered two more oncogenes: Ha-ras, named after the Harvey sarcoma virus which normally infected rats, and SV40 Large T from a virus usually found in monkey kidneys. From the RNA studies in the second thermocycler, where Sean had run a quantitative polymerase chain reaction, it was determined that all the oncogenes were “mega” expressed.

“What an oncogene cocktail!” Sean said with awe as he stood and stretched his weary muscles. “Any nerve cell that got those four would undoubtedly become cancerous. Dr. Levy was leaving as little to chance as possible.”

Janet put down the pipette she was holding and cradled her head in her hands. In a tired voice she spoke without looking up: “What now?”

“We give up, I guess,” Sean said. As he tried to contemplate the next step, he glanced into the office at the Masons who were arguing again. Mercifully, the glass partition dampened the sound of their voices considerably.

“How are we going to manage the giving up?” Janet asked sleepily.

Sean sighed. “You know, I hadn’t given it much thought. It could be tricky.”

Janet looked up. “You must have had some idea when you came up with this plan.”

“Nope,” Sean admitted. “I didn’t think that far ahead.”

Janet pushed off her seat and went to the window. From there she could see down into the parking lot. “You got that circus you wanted,” she said. “There are hundreds of people out there, including a group in black uniforms.”

“They’re the ones who make me nervous,” Sean admitted. “I’d guess they’re a SWAT team.”

“Maybe the first thing we should do is send the Masons out to tell them that we’re ready to come out.”

“That’s an idea,” Sean said. “But you’ll go with them.”

“But then you’ll be in here alone,” Janet said. She came back and sat down. “I don’t like that. Not with all those black-uniform guys itching to come charging in here.”

“The biggest problem is Helen Cabot’s brain,” Sean said.

“Why?” Janet asked with a sigh of exasperation.

“It’s our only evidence,” Sean said. “We cannot allow the Forbes people to destroy the brain which I’m certain they’d do if given the chance. My guess is that I’ll not be very popular with anybody when we end this. During the confusion there’s a good chance the brain could get into the wrong hands. I doubt anyone is going to take the time to stop and hear me out.”

“I’d have to agree,” Janet said.

“Wait a second!” Sean said with sudden enthusiasm. “I’ve got an idea.”