Invasive Procedures (8 page)

Monica felt sick again. She wanted nothing more than to go back into the room, grab Wyatt, and run. Stone was no longer around. She was alone now with Galen and felt fairly confident that she and Wyatt could outrun him.

But Stone couldn’t be far. Plus she had no idea where she was exactly, which direction led to an exit, and how far away help might be once she found it. If she was in a hospital, maybe help was closer than she realized.

Then again, Galen had said he had designed the room for Wyatt himself. If it
was
a hospital, it wasn’t a functioning one.

“Well, no need to diddle daddle,” he said. “I imagine you’ll want to meet them as soon as possible.”

“Meet who?”

“Your patients,” he said, rubbing his hands together. Then he turned on his heels and headed down the corridor. After a few steps he turned back and motioned for her to follow. “Well, come on then.”

Monica took a final look at the door. Even with it closed she could hear the sounds of the video game. Wyatt was occupied. And for now, more importantly, he was safe. If she did what she was asked, he’d remain safe. Or so she hoped.

“Time is precious, Doctor,” Galen said, walking backward and waving her to come quickly.

With no other option but to obey, Monica followed.

The Gulfstream was somewhere over the Midwest, heading toward Los Angeles. By now, Frank felt even more unsettled by the image of the dead police officer and the rest of the V16 report. If what Agent Riggs said was true, these Healers, as they called themselves, had two identities. The public knew them as civil servants, a fringe religion based more on human kindness than on any specific theology. They wore black capes, gave out free food, and treated simple surface wounds with bandages and Neosporin. A walking first-aid kit with a meal to boot.

But in the shadows, unbeknownst to most, Healers had a much more complex agenda. There they had built a virus in hopes of using it to heal those with genetic diseases.

“And the cape,” Frank said, “this cape you found in the rubble after the explosion, that’s the only bit of evidence you have to link these . . . Healers to the labs and the virus?”

“No,” said Riggs. “We also found this.” He opened a briefcase and removed a plastic evidence bag. Inside the bag was a badly burned book, no bigger than a thin paperback. He offered the bag to Frank.

“What is it?” Frank said.

“Open it.”

Frank unsealed the plastic bag, removed the book, and examined its cover. It was made of brown suede and had been damaged by both fire
and the water that had extinguished the fire. Frank checked the spine and gently wiped some of the soot off the cover in hopes of finding a title. There wasn’t one.

Carefully, so as not to damage the pages any more than they already were, Frank opened the book. Most of the pages were burned at the corners or heavily wrinkled from water damage. At first Frank thought this a journal, since the text was handwritten instead of printed.

Then he found the illustrations.

Glued into the book at what seemed a random order were hand-drawn illustrations that reminded Frank of drawings found in monastic manuscripts. Except instead of featuring saints and angels or pious-looking cardinals,
these
drawings all depicted the same young, dark-haired man in a white shirt and red necktie. In the first illustrations the man had a hand extended, raising someone from a sickbed.

He was a Healer in the traditional sense.

One of the illustrations was much more difficult to decipher. In it, the young man in the red necktie stood in the center of the page, his hands pressed together as if in prayer. Held between his hands was a syringe with the needle pointed heavenward with gold rays of light shooting forth from the needle’s tip. Flanking the man in the red necktie were two naked men nearly twice his size, their muscles massive, their necks thick. Rays of light from the syringe rested on selected parts of their body: their arms, their legs, their chest, their nose, their feet. Frank was clueless as to the drawing’s meaning.

Continuing on, he flipped to the final illustration. It was wider than the others, filling two full pages and only slightly damaged by fire. Here there were five men in red neckties, all identical, like quintuplets, standing in a circle, arms linked. Their hands were pressed together in front of them. Light shot from their fingertips and converged into a single orb of golden light glowing above them. The caption at the bottom of the illustration read:
The Council of the Prophets
.

Frank looked up at Riggs, an eyebrow raised. “Council of the Prophets?”

Riggs shrugged. “Your guess is as good as ours. What
is
clear is that these Healers are a few doughnuts short of a dozen. If you think the illustrations are weird, you should try reading the text.”

“What is it?” Frank said, turning the book over in his hands.

“As far as we can tell, it’s the Healer Bible, so to speak. Their book of scripture.”

Frank flipped back to the beginning. The title page had survived the fire.

THE BOOK OF BECOMING
Helping Man Reach His Full Potential
by George Galen

“George Galen,” Frank said, looking up at Riggs with a tone of recognition. “Why is that name familiar to me?”

“He’s a geneticist,” said Riggs. “Something of a scientific legend, I’m told. Years ago he served as one of the principal researchers on the Human Genome Project.”

Ah yes, thought Frank. Pompous George Galen. He had enjoyed a brief flash of fame following the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. What was supposed to have taken researchers fifteen years to complete, Galen and the others had done in thirteen, two years ahead of schedule. The project successfully identified the thirty thousand or so protein-coding genes in human DNA and determined the sequences of the three billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. The resulting database was to be used as the foundation for further genetic research and sequencing. All life sciences were affected by it: biology, medicine, even sociology to some extent. It was the supposed beginning of the genomic age.

But the project was not without its obstacles, Frank remembered. Galen clashed often with colleagues, arguing over what researchers called ELSI, or the ethical, legal, and social implications of the human genome. According to some accounts, one argument became so heated that Galen threw a chair, which struck and broke a research assistant’s nose. No charges were ever filed, but Galen thereafter brought a contentious mood to the project. The
New York Post
even ran a cartoon in which two lab assistants were strangling each other with strands of DNA.

It was a public relations nightmare.

The situation only worsened when the project concluded and Galen returned to his post at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a small component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
There Galen discovered that his annual budget was still a paltry two percent of the NIH’s annual allotted spending.

Galen claimed he had been cheated. With the genome mapped, he was ready to translate the sequence information into potential health benefits. But to do so he needed money. And lots of it.

Rather than take his case to the NIH, however, Galen did the unthinkable: he hit the talk-show circuit, slandering the NIH and blaming it for all the medical maladies Galen believed would be cured should he be granted the proper resources and funding. What he said about the presidential administration and those in Congress responsible for allocating the NIH’s funding was no less scathing.

It was professional suicide. Galen was thereafter ignored in all scientific circles. The NHGRI sent him packing and stripped him of all standing. Even universities, which had always extended an inviting hand, now turned a blind eye.
Time
magazine even ran a front cover article entitled “Fallen from Grace.” After that, Galen slipped from the public radar.

That was seven or eight years ago.

“Galen is a Healer?” asked Frank.

“So it seems,” said Riggs.

“I suppose that makes sense,” said Frank. “If you’re going to attempt to make a gene-therapy virus, and do what modern medicine has not yet achieved, you’re going to need the talents of someone like George Galen.”

“Yes,” Riggs agreed.

“What about the guy in all the illustrations?” said Frank. “The guy with the tie.”

Riggs shrugged. “Not sure. But whoever he is, Galen and the Healers consider him their prophet.”

“And the Council of the Prophets? These men that look like five versions of the same guy. What about them?”

“Like I said, your guess is as good as ours. The book raised more questions than it answered. But it did help in one respect.”

“And that is?”

Riggs gestured for the book, and Frank handed it to him.

“Here in the back.” He flipped to the end of the book. “We found a list.”

Frank looked. There, handwritten on the page, was a list of names and
addresses. Some of the addresses were burned away or only partially legible, but some remained unscathed. Beside each name was written a genetic disease.

“Who are these people?” Frank asked.

“Patients,” Riggs said. “People whom the Healers have treated with the virus.”

Frank felt his stomach tighten. “What do you mean ‘treated’? They were
given
the virus?”

“After we found the book—and remember this was all in the last forty-eight hours—we went to one of these addresses to talk to this person.” He pointed to the first name on the list. “Patrick Caneer. Sickle-cell anemia.”

“And?”

“And we found him, in bed, with an IV in his arm and with several large sheets of plastic hanging from the ceiling in a circle around his bed. Like the boy in the bubble.”

“A containment curtain?”

“A do-it-yourself containment curtain,” Riggs said. “Healers had hung the plastic, given him the virus, and then told him to stay in bed for three days while the virus ran its course and cured his sickle-cell anemia.”

Frank was momentarily dumbfounded. The audacity of a homemade curtain, the idea that a little tarp and some duct tape could keep a virus like VI6 in check, made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Compared to all the many doors and precautions that existed in Biosafety Level 4, a few sheets of plastic was practically nothing.

“And when you found him, how was he?” Frank said.

“Scared out of his mind,” said Riggs, “not because of the virus, but because he thought we were going to arrest him. Decent kid. In his early twenties.”

“He wasn’t harmed by the virus?”

“Remember, the virus can be engineered for a specific person. In this case, it had been engineered for Patrick Caneer. The strain of virus carried exactly what
he
needed, the genes to cure
his
sickle-cell. To everyone else, however—Patrick’s family, his neighbors—the virus was a terrible threat. Lethal, even. Let’s not forget our friend here.” He tapped the image of the dead police officer. “And the Healers are obviously aware of the threat. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother to build a containment curtain.
Patrick also informed us that the Healers explained to his family the need to steer clear of the kid while the virus ran its course.”

Insane. Absolutely insane. So irresponsible in the handling of a lethal virus that it took Frank a second to gather his thoughts. “And when you found him,” he said finally, “he was okay?”

“We went in in full biogear, contained the whole apartment. Then we took him to our infirmary. He’s been there ever since. But that’s not even the really bizarre part of the whole story. The bizarre part is this. According to tests we’ve conducted, he no longer has sickle-cell anemia.”

Frank couldn’t hide his surprise. “You mean . . . he’s cured?”

“I mean he no longer has sickle-cell anemia. Whether it was the virus or not, I don’t know. But the kid ain’t sick with sickle-cell anymore. That much I
do
know.”

Frank put a hand to his head. This wasn’t making sense. A crazy religion, made up of bodybuilders, no less, had enlisted the help of a blacklisted geneticist and whipped up a gene-therapy virus that by one account, at least, might actually work.

“You’re telling me this kid is in your infirmary right now?”

“Right now.”

“And he still has the virus inside him?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. And that’s why we needed the countervirus you created immediately, whether it was fully tested or not. We have to get it in this kid, not to mention the other patients we’ve picked up from this list.”

“The others?”

“There’s eight names on this list. We’ve collected all eight of them. They’ve all been to our infirmary. All in the last forty-eight hours. And they’re all waiting for you.”

Frank sat forward in his seat. “You mean they all still have the virus in them, whatever strain they were given?”

“No,” said Riggs. “Some of them were patients weeks ago—months ago, even.”

“And they’ve been lying in bed in a containment curtain all this time?”

“No, they’ve been living their lives normally,” Riggs said. “Better than normal, because they don’t show any symptoms of the genetic disease they once had.”

“So they’ve been healed?”

“So it seems.”

Frank looked down at the list of names and then back up at Agent Riggs. “But how are they able to move about and interact with people in the world if they have the virus in them?”

“That’s just it,” said Riggs. “They don’t have the virus in them. Three days after giving someone the virus, Healers return and administer
their
version of a countervirus, which cleans the virus out of the person’s system. They take down the plastic. The Healer leaves. And the person goes about his or her life again.”

“So the Healers have a countervirus?”

“A version of one. Apparently. That’s how they stop the virus in the people they treat. We, however, for the past six months, have only had a sample of the
virus
. We haven’t had a countervirus. Now, thanks to you, we do.”