Heart of Danger (21 page)

He cocked his head slightly to one side. “What did you read off the dementia patients?”

“I wear latex gloves. We all do.”

He said nothing, just watched her.

“Okay,” Catherine sighed. “Sometimes I touched them.”

“And you read—?”

“Darkness,” she said softly. “Despair. Sometimes—nothing.”

He flinched slightly.

“Yes. It is a terrible disease. I wanted to have a hand in helping to do something about it.”

“So you have the patients for how long?”

“Six months. We test various drug protocols. We were very excited about a new drug. It has gone through several iterations. It sometimes re-creates new neuronal connections that bypass the damaged areas of the brain and is definitely in line with the latest hypotheses of the brain as a connectome. Management believed we might be on to a miracle drug. We’d tested it on chimpanzees and their problem-solving abilities shot up.” She stopped, remembering the chimpanzee massacre with a shudder. “Unfortunately, one iteration was a major fail. We were drawing up protocols for human trials when it emerged that after about a month of treatment, one of the iterations of the prototype drug drove the chimpanzees insane. There was an uprising. An entire generation of chimps had to be put down. They were highly aggressive, out of control. It was a disaster.”

“Move on.” His jaw muscles clenched. “Patient Nine.”

Yeah. Happy to move on, very happy.

The massacre of the chimps had been a dark cloud hovering over the lab for months.

“Of course. Patients are switched out on June 30 and December 31. So on December 31 we had a new intake, twenty patients. I started work in the new year on January 2 and took the original anamneses. Patients One through Twenty, suffering from severe dementia. I assessed them all, going over their medical records. Everything had to be impeccable because if the new drug with the new molecule worked, we had to have a baseline. So though the patients’ medical records were complete, we started again from scratch. They were too advanced to do the usual mini mental exams but we did everything else. Fundoscopy to measure intracranial pressure, EMGs to measure fasciculation, the Barré test for pronator drift . . . the lot. Then each patient had a complete blood workup and a functional MRI.”

He hadn’t looked lost and his eyes hadn’t glazed over. He’d had medic training. Clearly he was familiar with medical terminology.

“Immediately I saw that there was something . . . different about Patient Nine.”

“Different how?”

She shrugged. “I couldn’t put my finger on it until the fMRI came back. Functional MRIs in dementia patients show completely different patterns than in normal patients. And they show inactive areas. Did you ever see those maps of internet connections in North Korea before the Uprising and the founding of the Korean Republic?”

He nodded.

“It’s like that in dementia patients. Entirely blank areas, in human brains that have more connections than there are stars in the Milky Way. Patient Nine’s scan was completely different. Clinically, he showed signs of very advanced dementia. But his scan—it was, well, it was one of the most unusual scans I’d ever seen. It was as if—as if his mental faculties had been artificially suppressed, but underneath there was cognitive function. Highly unusual.”

“What did he look like?” His eyes had sharpened, narrowed. He seemed to be listening to her with his ears, but also with his eyes and his skin, attention completely focused on her.

“Tall,” she answered. “Even bedridden. His charts put him at one meter ninety-five, weight sixty-five kilograms, down from probably one-ten. He was emaciated. He’d once been a muscular man, but now his skin hung off his bones. That is usual in advanced dementia cases. Patients lose their appetite, sometimes they even forget what food is for, or they mistake objects for food. Everything is haywire. He was, to use a layman’s term, a mess.”

“Did you have background information?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I told you, they were referred to by numbers. Everything except their medical background was redacted from the file so our observations would be unbiased. But—I think he was in the military.”

“If you have no info on him and he was bedridden, how could you assess that?”

“I touched him.”

“Touch . . .
touch
?”

“Yes. I don’t use my ability”—
curse—
“for research purposes. There’s no way I can corroborate what I learn. It’s untested, unscientific. Misleading, even. I never know when I can trust it.”

“Have you ever made a mistake?” His voice was quiet.

“Mistake?”

“Yeah. You ever get a bad reading? Think someone was real happy but turns out was suicidal? Think someone was in love and he stabbed the girl instead? Get it really really wrong?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

He digested that while she just looked at him. She was finding it hard to concentrate because he was this huge . . . distraction, sitting right across from her. Filling her field of vision, sucking all the oxygen out of the room, taking up all of her head space.

He was fascinating to look at, a magnet for the eyes. Her eyes, at least.

She’d spent almost her entire life in school. Three years ago she’d left the confines of graduate school only to move directly into a research lab which was virtually indistinguishable from her university lab, except the equipment was better and more expensive.

And every step of the way, the men were clones of each other.

The only variables were height, otherwise the men she’d spent all her grad student and working life with were virtually the same. Thin, because science nerds don’t have time to eat. With glasses, old-fashioned as that was. Surgically enhanced eyes still had trouble coping with the close work required of someone staring into the small screens of electron microscopes all day, and since nerds weren’t vain, it was just easier to wear glasses. In a world where no one wore glasses anymore, it was like a sign, right there on their faces.
I am a nerd.

They had no muscles, none. Building up muscles required time and desire and the men she worked with had neither. They lived entirely in their heads. Their bodies were an afterthought.

And they had no hormones, or at least none that she could detect, not that she was any kind of an expert.

They were the exact opposite of the man sitting across from her, who was huge, heavily muscled, fairly oozing testosterone and pheromones.

Everything about him was so fascinating. He was like some chimera, some wild mythical beast of the forest suddenly come to life. She could observe him for days, a little wary, as you should be with mythical creatures. He could disappear, he could leap on her . . . you had no idea what he could do.

The men she was used to had vague gazes, inward-directed, trying to puzzle out the secrets of nature. This man seemed to know them already. His gaze was direct, knowing, hard. A man who lived in the real world. And that body. Wow. A body like that should be illegal. Or at least he should have the good taste to keep it away from susceptible women.

He leaned back slightly, big hands on the tabletop. They were incredibly fascinating, too. Rough-skinned, nicked, callused. With that long white ladder-like scar across the back of the right one.

He kept perfectly still. She’d never seen anyone, man or woman, who could keep as still as he could. As he listened to her, he moved only his eyes. It was like sitting across from some huge jungle cat crouching, stealthily awaiting its prey.

Her.

“Patient Nine.” It wasn’t a request.

She looked down at the table, as if there were some fact there, though of course there was nothing but a wooden surface. But she didn’t need a memo. Patient Nine was etched in her memory with acid.

“I first saw him, as I said, on January 3.” She remembered it so well. She’d spent New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day on her own. Going in to work had been a relief because at least she’d hear human voices. “Patient Nine was physically in a bad way. As I said, he’d had numerous surgeries, and though the wounds had all closed without infection, sometimes you could tell that he’d had surgery on top of surgeries.” She shuddered at the memory. There had been something . . . unsettling about seeing a man who’d been worked over so much. “He was restrained. His eyes were closed when I came into the room. I’d dedicated the morning to going through all the patient files, checking their paperwork and giving them a physical examination. Just getting a baseline, like I said. Then I went into each room to get a feel for them. Just a preliminary check. Patient Nine was unresponsive, as were most of them. I was taking his BP when all of a sudden his eyes opened wide and he grabbed my wrist, above the latex glove. It was . . . it was a shock.”

Open, aware eyes, deep and pained but fully human, fully alive. It had shocked her, she’d been so used to the dull, dazed eyes of the other patients, once human, now so lost.

This man wasn’t lost, not at all. He was tethered by the IV lines and he couldn’t speak but he was aware. Terribly aware.

“He spoke to me,” she whispered, remembering that electric moment. “He told me he was trapped. Some terrible wrong had been done. People he cared about had suffered. He needed . . . he needed something very badly. He wanted something to be done but I couldn’t understand . . .”

Catherine looked Mac straight in the eyes. His dark eyes were watching her intently, unblinking. “It was minutes before I understood he wasn’t actually speaking. Not with his vocal cords. His mouth wasn’t moving. This was all done . . . mentally.” Her hands lifted, spread, dropped helplessly back on the table. “Or telepathically, psychically. Or
something.
I have no idea how he was talking to me. It had never happened to me before.”

He didn’t question any of this. “Was he using words? In . . . your mind?”

She shook her head sharply. “Some words. It was hard to tell, a lot of it was a jumble. But I got the heart of his message. Images, mostly. A building, in the snow. Voices shouting. Men pouring out of hidden recesses, armed, attacking other men. Funny-looking guns. Shots being fired. An explosion and a fire so hot the snow melted almost instantly. Men with some kind of luminous stripe on their helmets, going down.”

Mac’s eyes grew even darker. She could feel his attention sharpen to a point.

“You have to understand that this had never happened to me—I’d never seen so clearly before. Usually all I get are feelings. This time I saw the images and felt the emotions at the same time. Danger, like a knife cutting through me. Some deep sense of betrayal, something dark, something that cut off my oxygen. Over it all . . .” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Over it all was your face.”

He didn’t move, didn’t betray any emotion, but Catherine felt his surprise like a whip. “
My
face? You sure?”

She nodded and swallowed heavily. In the vision given her by Patient Nine, the entire right side of Mac’s face had been black with burns, raw red skin showing underneath the charred skin. Horrible burns, out of a nightmare, now just scars. “Yours. And the emotions connected to it were pain and sorrow. His. Patient Nine’s.” She searched his eyes. “This is making sense to you, right? The burning building, the firefight and the massive fire afterward? Betrayal?”

He nodded slowly. “That’s all you got?”

“That day, yes. That, and an overwhelming sense that no one should know. It felt . . . imperative that we keep this a secret.” She remembered staggering back, nearly faint from the intensity of what had been blasted at her. Feeling naked and bare, as if her skin had been flayed. Wondering if she’d had a psychotic episode, or maybe even some type of seizure. “The next day I wasn’t taken by surprise. I was also very aware that the sessions are recorded. The sense that this was a secret—that people would die if it weren’t kept a secret—was very strong, almost crippling. It was one step short of full-blown paranoia, and I tolerated it because it felt so very real. Back in my office, I ran the tape of our session to confirm that from the outside, no one could tell anything had happened. A patient had grasped my arm, that was all. Advanced dementia patients have lost all fine motor skills. Unless they are sedated, some flail wildly. There was nothing on that tape that could have raised eyebrows.”

Mac was so still he could have been a statue. “And the next day?”

The next day she broke with protocol and started the process that led step by dangerous step to this hidden place and to this moment. “The next day I turned my back to the camera and took my right glove off and held Patient Nine’s hand,” she said softly.

He understood, pursed his lips and blew out a silent whistle. “I take it both those things were no-nos.”

“Absolute no-nos,” she agreed. “Being-kicked-out-and-blackballed-forever no-nos.” She closed her eyes for a moment. Even in retrospect what happened next was overpowering.

“Lose-your-job, security-called, your-things-packed-in-a-box no-no?” he persisted.

“Yeah. All that good stuff.”

“It was brave of you to do that, then.”

Catherine looked at him, startled. Was he making fun of her? But looking at the grim lines of his face, she decided no. He wasn’t making fun of her. That face looked as if fun was not in its vocabulary.

“Yes, well, um . . .” That face was so absolutely fascinating. It had been in her head for days now, had been her obsession. She’d risked everything to find the person it belonged to and she had. Mission accomplished.

But that face was even more of an obsession now that she’d found him.
Concentrate, Catherine.

“This time, it was more forceful than the day before. Almost as if new neural pathways had opened up in me or in him.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell. It was the same as before, very clear but somehow . . . weaker, too. With a sense of huge struggle to get to me. I checked his chart and he’d been sedated with a stronger than usual dose. His eyes—” She closed her own, remembering.

“His eyes?” Mac prodded.

“Tragic and lost,” she whispered. Patient Nine’s eyes still haunted her. A look so desolate it alone had been enough to propel her into possible danger. “Trying so hard to communicate with me. He was struggling desperately with the effects of the drug. It should have knocked him out yet there he was, weakened terribly, but still awake and aware. I had the sense of . . . of an iron will underneath it all. The sense of a man who simply would not—could not quit. Didn’t know how to quit.”