CHAPTER 8
For a long couple of moments, Kat didn’t think she could bring herself to tell this doltish oaf anything personal about herself, especially about the gaping wound inside that could still sear and pain and throb and hurt her afresh when it stole into her mind unexpectedly.
But what was happening back in her lab was so important, so far beyond anything she could have imagined, that she couldn’t see how she could keep from paying any price that this obviously unbalanced maniac wanted her to pay in order to get the information she needed. Under the lens of her one-hundred-power Zeiss microscope, she had seen a miracle. It could be described in no other way. It made her earlier success seem insignificant and puny by comparison.
Anyway, what did it really matter what she told Ramsey? Probably half the people working at the BioTech laboratory already knew. In fact, Ramsey himself probably already knew and was just interested in having the devious pleasure of hearing the story from her own lips. The scientific and medical communities were relatively small ones, and juicy bits of gossip like her failure in the operating theater would spread from hospital to hospital with the speed of light, especially given the prominence of her family in that community. There were always those who took malicious delight in seeing the mighty pulled low.
“Clock is really spinning, Doc. I can feel myself beginning to fade away. The monster is on his way. I can feel him welling up within my chest. Strangely enough, he looks like Spencer Tracy.”
Kat gritted her teeth, thinking of it as one more sacrifice she had to make to obtain the secret. She told her story in a detached way, almost as if she was talking about a friend or colleague. “In my last year of neurosurgery residency, during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I entered an exchange program at Walter Reed Hospital to gain experience dealing with traumatic spinal injuries. Unfortunately, there were plenty of them to be had because of the ongoing offensive in the Middle East.”
She paused and walked over to sit in front of the window and stared out, not noticing the sweat that had broken out on her face with the strain of remembering. “For nine weeks, I operated day and night, patching together spines that had been torn apart and shattered, trying to splice torn nerves to limbs that would never work again no matter how well I sutured them, trying to cure traumatic brain injuries and then having to face boys who were years younger than me and tell them that their lives as they knew them were over.”
She wiped unconsciously at the sweat dripping into her eyes. “They would never walk, run, or make love again. They would be forever prisoners in their beds or wheelchairs, wearing dignity-defeating diapers and catheters, depending on others for their care for the rest of their lives.” She sighed deeply. “Or even worse, not even recognizing their loved ones because the neurons in their brains didn’t connect to each other anymore.”
She continued to stare out the window, unable to meet Ramsey’s eyes. “After a couple hundred such operations, my repeated failures began to undermine my confidence in my ability to help anyone, not just the hopeless cases.” She glanced down at her hands, and then she clenched them into fists. “My hands began to shake, not much, just a little. But when you’re working in spaces defined by millimeters, with life on one side of the line and death on the other, even a little shakiness is too much. Finally, during a rather routine subdural hematoma evacuation, I knew I was more of a danger to the patient than a savior, so I asked my assistant to take over and I walked out of the operating room.”
Kat looked over at Ramsey with tortured eyes. “I never operated again. I finished my residency doing postoperative care only and never picked up a scalpel again.” She finished the story with her decision to leave the practice of medicine and enter the field of research, where she felt she could still serve without fear of doing harm to others. She thought she’d told her story elegantly and simply, not sparing herself the lash of failure but making it plain that, with all the talent she’d been given, had come a responsibility that she was too young and too callow to handle.
When she was finished, Ramsey stared at her for a second. Ramsey felt the stirrings of an unfamiliar feeling: shame. “What do you mean, your hands started shaking?”
“Exactly that,” Kat said with as much dignity as she could manage after feeling like she had just figuratively stripped herself naked in front of Ramsey. “My hands shook, and I lost my nerve.” She drew herself up. “I’ve seen it happen to others, but I never dreamed it would happen to me.”
Ramsey shuddered, suddenly sober. He had rarely seen such pain and suffering in another human being, and the fact that he had forced Williams to undergo telling her story and reliving the pain as a joke made him feel very small.
He got up and went to the door, looking at the floor. “Please leave. I’ve heard enough.”
Kat stared at him in amazement. She was continually dumbfounded by Burton Ramsey. She had to keep asking herself how such a hoodlum, bully, and social misfit could have achieved a Ph.D. and risen to a prominent position in such a demanding discipline. “You owe me the knowledge of what you injected those rats with, Burton. We had a deal, and even such a man as yourself must feel honor bound to live up to it.”
Ramsey now was the one unable to meet Williams’s eyes. He had no intention of giving her the secret of his research and he never had, but he had not expected to feel so bad about what he had made the doctor do. He needed time to think, and he needed to do it without Williams being present. “Okay, let me think about it. I’ll get back to you tomorrow with my decision.”
Kat started to speak, and then she just shook her head and walked out of the office, her back straight and her head held high.
Ramsey looked at his watch. It was a quarter ’til two, and if he was lucky, he just might catch Sheila at her office in the Methodist hospital before she started seeing patients after her lunch break. He knew he needed the lift that seeing her would give him. He quickly dialed the number and waited until she came on the phone. He loved her voice. It was always so warm and soft and controlled. It always made him feel like she was standing right next to him.
He said, “What time will you be heading home?”
“Well, if it’s any of your business, somewhere around half past six. Dr. Slack has asked me to see one of his patients at six, but that shouldn’t take long.” Then her voice took on a guarded tone. “Why?”
“Well, I’m bored here and about ready to split. I thought I’d pick up some groceries and fix us a fabulous dinner.”
There was a slight sound of dismay in her voice. She said, “Oh Burton, don’t cook. Dear God, please don’t cook.”
“Sheila, I’m offended. If a goddamn biochemist can’t cook, who can? I may have been a little overly ambitious in the past, but I’ve learned from that. I’m thinking of bouillabaisse. That’s just a fish soup. I make marvelous soups in this lab every day and then stick ’em in rats.”
She sounded desperate. “Burton, please don’t cook. Let’s go out. It’s not just your, uh, unusual dishes. It’s the mess you leave. The last time you cooked, I couldn’t bring myself to face the kitchen for three days. Promise me you won’t cook.”
“Goddamnit, Sheila, there you go again. Just because you’re the love of my life does not allow you to impugn my skills as a culinary artist. I’m the big dick around here and don’t you forget it.”
“I’ll agree you’re a big dick, though I wish I could say the same for your penis.” She paused, and then she added suspiciously, “You’re not drunk, are you?”
“At this time of day? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Well, that’s something I want to talk to you about, but not over the phone.” His voice got a little hoarse. “I need some TLC right about now and I need you.”
“I know you do, Burton.” She sighed. “Okay, come on over tonight and do your worst with my kitchen, and then, if we’re able to after eating what you cook, we’ll talk.”
“There is more truth in that than you know, my girl. Get home as soon as you can. Bouillabaisse is best served fresh from the stove.” He hung up the phone and mixed himself another drink, a very weak one, already starting to plan the dinner he was going to create.
* * *
Kat went back to her lab and into her office and closed the door. Kevin was recording some data at the computer, but Kat paid him no mind. She sat down heavily in her chair and stared into space, thinking. It was hard to imagine, she thought, but her whole future might well be in the hands of Burton Ramsey, an obvious drunk and a neurotic.
She could not quite come to understand how such a circumstance could have entered her well-ordered life. She did not associate with people like Burton Ramsey. They were not allowed to be a part of her life. And yet, this man was not only in her life, but he practically had control of it, and all without knowing—or caring.
That was what puzzled Kat—Ramsey didn’t seem at all interested in anything she, Kat, had to say. For all Ramsey knew, she could be offering him the next Nobel Prizes in both Medicine and Chemistry. But Ramsey didn’t even bother to listen. He had stated flatly that his work was done and that was that. Most scientists would have been at least a little curious about why Kat was so interested in their work. Maybe it was the alcohol. He must have been too drunk to realize how serious Kat was.
As unpleasant as the confrontation had been, the news that the rats had been previously injected with something had been exhilarating. It had answered all of her questions about why the NeurActivase had finally worked. She had barely been able to wait for Ramsey to leave that morning before she’d taken one of the blue rats out and run him through the maze.
The improvement had continued, and it was clearly obvious that some sort of symbiotic enhancement existed between her serum and Ramsey’s. She had taken one of the precious six test rats and, after killing it in the usual manner, had taken a specimen from the animal’s brain. She had prepared a slide and, with trembling fingers, slid it into the microscope.
She was prepared to be surprised, but not quite to such an extent. Not only was the specimen tissue packed with neural cells, but they were all healthy and young-looking. The amazing spectacle to her had been how young all of the tissue looked. It simply wasn’t consistent with that age of a rat. To verify her point, she had sacrificed a three-year-old control rat and taken a sample of brain tissue. The two tissue sections were almost comparable except for the much-increased neural cells in the five-year-old. Either the five-year-old rat had been mislabeled, or something was making the animal’s tissues seem younger and healthier, not to mention the improvement in intelligence that accompanied the other changes.
And that something had to be whatever Ramsey had obviously perfected. Kat had sat back and put her hand to her forehead. Ramsey stood directly in her way, right in her path to greatness, blocking her progress. No, that was not right, she thought. It was not her greatness or her fame that was at stake . . . It was the millions of people who could be helped or cured with such a formula, if only Ramsey would cooperate.
Now she sat, lost in thought, searching for a way through the Ramsey bulwark. Through the glass partition of her office, her eyes strayed to Kevin, who was still working on the computer. She sat up straighter, an idea beginning to form. Among her other accomplishments, Kat was a computer expert and was as much at home with them as any other equipment she used. It would be, she thought, the perfect way to cut Ramsey out of the picture.
She couldn’t burglarize Ramsey’s office, but she might be able to break in to his files electronically. She got up, left her office, and went into the small bathroom contained in the lab. She smoothed her hair and then opened her compact and blotted on a little extra makeup. She looked into the mirror and practiced a smile.
There was a silly young man down in the records room who appeared to her to get the stutters every time she came around. She might just be able to induce him to give her the phone number of the biochemist’s computer and let her take a peek into Ramsey’s personnel file. People habitually used some piece of personal baggage, such as their birth date or their middle name or their wife’s maiden name, as their access code or the password to their computer’s records. With Ramsey, she expected it to be something as unimaginative as his initials.
If she could get the young man in the records room to let her get some of that sort of information, she had no doubt she could successfully hack Ramsey’s system. The files would probably be in code, but she was willing to bet that it would be a simple code, and cryptography had been one of her hobbies for years.
The secret of Ramsey’s serum would involve chemistry, and she was no chemist, but she knew a number of people who were, including her lab assistant, Kevin. Ramsey had embarrassed her terribly, sneering at her and forcing her to tell the story of her failure. She expected it was already the gossip of the laboratory, especially after the unceremonious way Ramsey had ushered her out of his office.
Well, she thought, time would tell just who would be embarrassed last.
She glanced over at Kevin, still inputting data into the computer. She had to get him out of the office so she could work her wiles on the boy in the office. She glanced down at Angus in his bed next to her desk. Of course . . .
“Kevin,” she called, motioning him over when he glanced up at her.
“Yes, Doctor?” he said.
“I need a huge favor.”
He got up and walked over to stand in front of her desk. “Yes, ma’am?”
“I’ve got some work to do down in the front office, and today is Angus’s day to go to the vet for his arthritis shot. Would it be too great of an inconvenience for you to run him over there for me? I’ve noticed he seems a lot more stiff than usual, and I’m afraid he may be in pain.”
Kevin smiled and shook his head. He cared for Angus almost as much as Kat did. “No, ma’am. I’ll take him right over and see that he gets his shot. We can’t have him hurting, can we?”
“Thank you, Kevin. Just tell Dr. Washburn to put it on my bill.”
Kevin grabbed Angus’s leash from the desk and bent over to pick the dog up.
“Ugh,” he grunted with a smile. “The old boy’s getting kinda heavy, too. I might just ask about putting him on a diet.”
Kat grinned. “Too many cookies, I guess.”
At the word cookie, Angus perked up his ears and barked.
Kevin laughed and patted Angus’s head, then walked out the door.
As soon as they’d left, Kat got up and followed them out into the hall. She was about to attempt to be charming, and she didn’t know if she remembered how.
* * *
Moments after Kat left her office, the door opened and a man entered. He moved directly to the cage where she kept her experimental rats. After observing them for a few minutes, he moved to the computer on her desk and turned it on.
When it was booted up, he scrolled to the pages devoted to the results of her experiments. “Holy shit,” he exclaimed softly to himself when he saw the maze results she’d recorded for the newly injected rats.
He quickly took a thumb drive from his pocket and inserted it in the USB slot of the computer, then copied her data onto it, shut the computer down, and left the room.