The Timer Game

He bared his teeth in a smile. The door wickered shut behind him. He stepped into the lobby. ‘Cynthia taking good care of you?’

Grace shot a smug smile at Cynthia but it was wasted. Cynthia shuffled papers, pretending to be busy.

Warren didn’t wait for an answer. He gripped Grace’s elbow gently and moved her out of harm’s way as he stood for a moment under the retina scanner. The red light beamed into his eyes. He blinked and the door reopened.

‘Quickly, quickly.’

He led her back into a hallway as the steel door closed behind them. They were in a corridor with laboratories. Grace could hear a synthesizer whirring softly in a lab down the hall, and the muted sound of voices coming from a conference room.

Warren turned and studied her, and the heartiness in his face fell away and was replaced with anger. ‘He could have killed you, damn it. I’ve left three messages since yesterday. You couldn’t pick up the phone and let me know you were all right?’

‘I wanted to come in person.’ She wondered if he could tell she was lying. ‘I have questions about Eddie Loud.’

Warren glanced quickly at the conference room and Grace realized Warren didn’t want whoever was in there overhearing them.

‘Follow me. I’ve got a meeting going on so I don’t have much time.’

In all the years she’d known him, he’d always had a meeting going on. Something big.

Warren had started the Center as a shoestring biotech company thirty years earlier, and hit the jackpot with a drug that became widely used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, inhibiting the immune system from attacking the body’s own cartilage. He’d taken that money and bought land, eventually building the Center for BioChimera. Now the company had grown to over three thousand employees worldwide, with manufacturing plants scattered across the globe.

But it was the hospital side that had attracted her. The chance to work with pediatric heart transplant patients and pursue new methods of controlling transplant rejection. When she’d been offered a residency, she’d jumped at it.

Warren had immediately singled her out, something that stunned her and made her uneasy at the same time. She had no interest in following Warren Pendrell into hospital administration, but she soon learned his interest was more complicated.

He’d lost a daughter about her age, he confided finally. Warren’s pain at losing his daughter Sara, and Grace’s need to have a dad, melded during her work at the Center. That and a mutual passion for research and healing. He’d personally recommended her for a position at Cedars-Sinai after her residency, and had helped set up the two months she’d spent in Guatemala working in a remote mountain clinic.

And then she’d come back from Guatemala and dropped out of medicine and taken a job at the crime lab.

She’d never told him why and Warren never let it drop, how her place was back at the Center leading the assault on transplant rejection and doing heart surgery on kids, instead of wasting her talent in some two-bit job with the police, barely scraping by.

She’d delivered Katie at the Center when the time came, and later Katie had ear surgery as a baby there, but the relationship between Warren and Grace had grown increasingly strained until it had erupted in a frightening outburst of pyrotechnics, Warren insisting she tell him why she’d given up medicine, Grace holding to silence. He’d apologized but she sensed lurking beneath the surface a fierce need to control, a need he was barely able to keep in check. Now their contact was relegated to stray lunches and occasional phone calls.

‘Do you know how many people I’ve mentored here in all these years? Exactly two.’

‘Warren.’ It was the opening volley of a familiar war and she didn’t have the taste for it.

‘Fine, fine, I’ll stop.’

She followed him into his private library and waited as he scooped up an open reference book from a leather sofa. The room was large, airy, painted Italian custard.

A plaster fireplace vaulted in sweeping simplicity, surrounded by chairs in a rich palette of gold and red, accenting his favorite painting, a Degas that hung near his Italian rosewood writing desk. Two walls held floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It was here he kept his collection of science journals, books on philosophy and religion and first-edition nineteenth-century European novels.

‘Sit anyplace.’ He turned his back on her and went to the window. ‘I’m relieved you’re all right, by the way,’ he said gruffly. ‘More relieved than you’ll know.’

She sank into the leather sofa. Soft sunlight floated through raw silk panels, spilling wide bands of light across the tiled floor.

He turned and she saw how tired he looked under the tan. ‘I don’t mean to be short. I’m under more pressure than usual this week, that’s all, and then when I heard how close you’d come to dying – well, it seems to have unhinged me. What do you need?’

‘Answers. You knew him personally, didn’t you? Eddie Loud.’

He gave her a long, measured look. ‘I think I’ll have a drink. May I get you something? Perhaps fresh papaya juice?’

‘Sounds wonderful.’

He went to the sideboard, glancing at the photograph of his daughter he kept in a small gilt frame. Taken years ago, it revealed a young woman with a strong jaw and merry eyes. She was lost in a corn maze, laughing, not sure which way led to the exit. It had been shot from above looking down, and the exit was within reach. She just couldn’t find it.

Losing her way seemed to have been a chronic problem. Sara had been a sophomore at Brandeis when she’d fallen in love with a foreign exchange student who police discovered was traveling with false papers and had a criminal record. He was deported and six weeks later, she’d dropped out of school and followed him to Central America. Warren sent a former Green Beret to capture her and drag her home, but she’d run away again, and this time he’d left her alone.

Warren’s gaze left the photo and settled on Grace. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘What do you need to know?’

She told him what Eddie Loud had said right before she killed him.

The color drained from his face. ‘Good God. You’re sure he said “He’s coming for you”? Those exact words?’

‘Yes. I’ll never forget it.’

Warren fixed their drinks, his face troubled. He handed Grace her glass and sat down, taking a long drink of scotch and rolling the heavy glass between his palms, studying the amber liquid. ‘“Run. He’s coming for you. The Spikeman.” Any ideas?’

She shook her head. ‘I was hoping it made sense to you.’ She took a sip of juice. It was sweet and wonderfully pulpy.

He was silent, mulling something over. He looked up.

‘He’s dead. Under the circumstances, I guess I can tell you some things.’

Warren drank some more and the ice clinked. He studied the glass.

‘Eddie Loud was schizophrenic. You know on the research side of the Center, we specialize in immunological disorders and treatment. We do the usual – arthritis, lupus, MS, transplant compatibility, but the last few years, since you left, we’ve added schizophrenia to the list. That’s what we do behind those wire windows on two.’

‘How can schizophrenia be an immunological disorder?’

‘Might not be, jury’s still out, but there’s a possibility that a simple virus in the fourth month in utero could contribute to a wiring problem significant enough to create it. We used magnetic resonance imaging and found structural defects in the temporal lobes, some cell changes. Anyway, we’re exploring whether we can reverse that damage on chromosome six – not just throwing drugs at the problem after the fact. It’s delicate and difficult.’

‘You were experimenting on Eddie Loud?’ It sounded colder than she’d intended, and Warren flinched and drained his glass.

‘Yes, he was enrolled in our experimental program and yes, the combination of gene therapy, drugs, and behavior modification seemed to be helping. I’ve known his dad four years or so. Eddie’s bounced around other treatment centers and Bert – that’s his dad, Senator Loud – heard about the work we were doing here and pleaded with me to take him. Big mistake. Clearly.’

Grace’s glass was empty and she put it down and slid her hands under her legs to warm them. ‘I don’t understand why he fixated on me.’

‘I don’t either.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s a chance he could have made it up. Eddie had a peculiar fascination for video. When he fell off his meds, he believed himself to be a hotshot reporter, going after the big story. In his room at the halfway house, they’d find equipment he’d ordered over the Internet and squirreled away, and once even props from a Hollywood set he’d managed to buy off eBay.’

She could see the headline: ALCOHOLIC CRIME LAB FORENSIC BIOLOGIST KILLS ALMOST DEFENSELESS MENTALLY ILL SON OF SENATOR.

‘That still doesn’t explain how he got my name and matched it to my face. And knew I was going to be at that particular meth house.’

Warren scrubbed his jaw with his knuckles. ‘God, what a mess.’

He put his glass down and moved to a wall of books. Long thin windows had been built into the shelves, revealing sudden views, as surprising as if the views themselves were a work of art. Soft clouds filtered across the narrow stamp of blue sky.

The shelf held a wooden toy of Sara’s that always reminded Grace of a parking garage, a series of small wooden ramps and painted wooden penguins. Warren absently touched the spring and the penguins clicked up a ramp, and the first one began its inexorable slide down the first chute into the turn. He wasn’t watching it. He was looking at her.

‘I have to tell you something in confidence, something that factors into all this. Want anything else to drink? Or a muffin or something?’

‘Thanks. I’m set.’

He made himself a second drink. The last penguin was ratcheting up a ladder to the top. It dipped its head and dove down the chute. He took a chair across from her.

‘Have you any idea how much this company’s worth?’

She shook her head.

‘The Center has developed, won regulatory approval for, and marketed over ten drugs dealing with specific immunology disorders: diabetes, Crohn’s, MS, transplants, cancer, AIDS.’

He paused. ‘It’s worth close to eight billion dollars, Grace. I know that because I just went through an extensive process of determining assets and liabilities. I’m selling.’

‘What?’

‘Just what I said. I built a world, and now I’m tired.’ He smiled dryly. ‘And perhaps a little old. I’ve never publicly traded the Center so it frees me in some ways to do slightly unorthodox things. Of course I have a team of high-priced experts, many of whom are sitting around my conference table right now wondering where the hell I am, but we’ve passed due diligence and it’s in escrow. We close at the end of the week. Everybody’s signed confidentiality agreements and noncompete clauses, and we’ve played it close to the vest. I’ve already signed off at the secretary of state’s office on a release of the name, so the new owners can continue using it.’

There was a quiet knock on the door and Warren’s assistant, a striking black woman named Karen, stuck her head in the door.

‘Sorry to interrupt, sir. The eastern sector pharmaceuticals rep has a plane to catch.’

Warren stood. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could stay. This will only take a minute.’

Grace nodded. Karen smiled neutrally and held the door open for Warren, closing it after him. They both retreated down the hall. Grace heard Warren’s voice in the conference room, muffled and hearty.

Eight billion dollars, Grace thought. To her it was Monopoly money, not real. She wondered what he was going to do with his share. His wife had died years before. All he had was this place. His telling her about it matter-of-factly, his trusting her with such a significant secret, troubled her. It had nothing to do with Eddie Loud and brought her no closer to finding Jazz Studio, and she feared it was his way of trying to hook her back in.

The door opened and Warren reappeared. He closed the door. ‘Sorry about that. I wouldn’t have told you if it wasn’t necessary, and of course this information is confidential and not to be shared.’

‘I understand.’

‘It’s a Swiss company called Belikond. They have their own marketing arm in place to smooth the way. They’ve pledged no personnel changes in the first twenty-four months, which makes it somewhat more palatable.’

‘The Center’s worth close to eight billion dollars?’ She was still on that.

‘Not just the Center. The manufacturing plants are in the mix, too, but the most significant assets are patents. The deal’s gone hard.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Belikond’s had to put hard money down, and whether the deal closes or not – and it will close, I assure you – the seller gets to keep the deposit.’ He paused. ‘Ten percent of the total purchase price is typical.’

She did the math in her mind and wished she were still drinking. She could use something a lot stronger than papaya juice.

‘And that seller getting to keep the hard money would be you.’

‘And others. Underwriting the Center are drug development companies, a cluster of university research deals, and some investment bankers willing to take huge risks. I’m the director but six others sit on the board, and getting them to agree on anything is like trying to get a bag full of cats to stop fighting. We’ve jumped through hoops the past ninety days – proof of title, physical inspection of the lands, the buildings, improvements – worldwide, Grace, not just here – and due diligence inspection of the IP’s. Intellectual properties. Checking that all the patents have been properly registered, and that there are no existing or potential claim infringements, and then dividing up each investor’s share. Oh, and then the lending bank sends over its own team and we do the dance all over again.’

‘And you’re closing when?’ She was certain he’d told her, she just couldn’t remember. She was on the verge of taking out a second mortgage on her house, just to repair the roof.

‘Delivery of assets, titles, full custody, and control gets turned over at the end of this week. I don’t have to be present, but I have to be on top of it.’

Under the tan, there were dark circles under his eyes.

‘My chunk – minus whatever part the government’s going to chip out for taxes – I want wired to an account in the Caymans. And since nobody but me has that access code, they’re going to electronically link me as the deal closes. I’ll have thirty seconds on my end to enter the access code, releasing my funds into my private account. If I miss that window, my share gets sent to my bank stateside, but for tax reasons, that’s something I’d like to avoid. My share is worth several hundred million dollars.’

The shock must have shown on her face. She looked around the immaculate space, studying his daughter’s photo so she wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. She wasn’t afraid of money and people who had it, but power tripped her up sometimes, and she could feel herself starting to fall.

‘So. You sell. You leave. Eddie Loud acted alone as a crazy person, God knows how he got my name. Nobody else is after me.’

‘Not exactly. I told you it was complicated. Yesterday, I got this.’

He went to his desk and unlocked the drawer and came back with a postcard. ‘Hand-delivered, left in a manila envelope for me downstairs at Information.’

The postcard was faintly blue in color, on handmade paper stock, with streaks of heavier blue weaving through it. There was no address or postmark. Warren Pendrell’s name had been typed on the message side, with a single typed sentence underneath: He’s coming for you, the Spikeman.

She turned the postcard over. Warren’s picture had been cut and pasted onto the postcard. It was blurred, shot as he stepped through the front door of the Center, a hand shading his eyes.

Imbedded in his chest was a crudely drawn butcher knife, dripping with blood.

‘“He’s coming for you, the Spikeman.” And the butcher knife. It’s the same threat, Grace. The same. One thing science teaches, there are no coincidences.’

‘You’re saying somebody could be after both of us? Who? Why?’

He shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’

‘I could take this in. Get somebody to run tests.’ She and Paul Collins were colleagues, but Marcie had worked next to Grace in the forensic biology lab for five years, and they were friends. The tall, emaciated, jumpy woman would figure out a way to have the postcard tested if Grace asked, even though fibers and documents were not handled in their lab, and the paper wasn’t saturated with biological fluids.

Warren shook his head. ‘The last thing I want is the police involved while I’m negotiating this deal. Businesses run on rumors and innuendo, Grace. The total valuation of the business has been in flux over the period of time we’ve negotiated, and I’m talking a flux that could cost us millions. I don’t want to hand Belikond anything else its team could use.’

‘Marcie’s very discreet.’

‘Grace, I’m serious. I want things quiet and on schedule. I’m telling you this because I want you to protect yourself. Let me rephrase that. I want to protect you. And Katie.’

‘We’re okay.’

‘God, you’re impossible. If you change your mind …’

She nodded. He held out his hand for the postcard and she reluctantly gave it to him. He relocked it in his desk and rang the receptionist.

‘Yes. Cynthia. Please alert Lee Bentley we’re on our way.’

Grace felt a visceral surge of panic and anger. He was doing it again. Broadsiding her.

‘Warren, you should have asked me first.’

‘So you could say no?’

‘I don’t have time.’

‘Make it.’ He reached for her hand.

TEN

Warren walked down the brightly lit hallway toward a lab at the far end of the corridor, Grace seething behind him, the images of Lee tumbling one on top of the other.

When Grace had been tapped to work the pediatric side of heart transplants at the Center, she’d immediately come into conflict with a leggy young researcher, Lee Ann Bentley, doing postdoc work on kids.

There had been a whiff of scandal that Lee had falsified lab results before coming to the Center in an effort to prove the effectiveness of a new immune suppressor used on chimps in heart transplants. Two primates had died before anything conclusive could be determined, the bodies conveniently cremated. Lee had been exonerated of any wrongdoing, but it had left Grace feeling there was something creepy buried under all that perfection.

Lee was concentrating on xenografts and xenobiotics, genetically altering animal hearts so that one day, they’d be recognized as human by a transplant recipient. Grace was going another direction completely: chimerism. Mutual cell assimilation. Tricking the body into accepting a new, human heart as if it were its own.

She’d stumbled onto it by accident years before during her internship – that if she first transplanted bone marrow from the donor, the patient’s immune system could be tricked into accepting the donor heart almost as if it were its own. That meant lower doses of immune-suppressant drugs. The patient would still have to be on a rigorous drug program for the rest of his life, but at lower doses. Since the immune-suppressant drugs were so toxic, the lesser the dosage the better.

Later, that groundbreaking research was validated when transplant surgeons in Lyon, France, infused an Australian patient with donor marrow cells before performing a successful hand transplant, and then again when a woman in Paris, infused first with marrow cells from a donor, had a partial face transplant.

But when Grace was trying it, she was among a small group of surgeons and the only one at the Center. She’d been working there only a couple of weeks when she butted heads with Lee over a patient, a six-year-old boy who needed a heart transplant.

Lee talked the parents into putting a genetically altered pig’s heart into his small chest. Grace had passionately argued with her in private beforehand. It was too experimental. Risky. Safer options hadn’t been exhausted yet. Lee had shrugged and smiled, and the smile had been a cold thing.

‘It doesn’t really matter, does it? If he dies?’

She’d said it so quickly, matter-of-factly, Grace wasn’t certain she’d heard correctly. ‘It does to his parents,’ Grace said. ‘It does to me.’

In the end, the parents prevailed, signing off on the surgery. The boy died three days later. A week afterward, a human heart became available that would have worked, and Grace had never forgiven Lee for killing him.

The research side of the Center had always been Warren’s particular interest, and Grace had a growing suspicion that Warren was willing to sacrifice patients on the hospital side to be used as guinea pigs for research that was still experimental.

Or she could just be jealous that Lee was Warren’s favorite now, and had been for some time. Part of her still missed him.

A sterile tray the size Grace used for making cookies glowed in purple light as Warren pushed open the door to the lab. ‘Don’t turn on the light. She’s got cartilage cells that are light sensitive.’

A green light cast a glow over the counters. It was a narrow, windowless room and Grace felt slightly claustrophobic. Out of the gloom, Lee Bentley emerged, her hair gleaming.

‘Well, well. We meet again.’

Her hair had grown long since Grace had last seen her, and she wore it in a thick braid that shone the color of wheat and made her cheekbones look high. She had the talent for smiling with her teeth and never having the smile ease up her face. Her eyes were pale green, humorless and cold. Somewhere in Lee’s genetic code, marauders clambered in fur boots over a dung hill, swinging mastodon thigh bones and shattering the skulls of slumbering children. She was taller than Grace and just as slender and could have easily modeled. Whips and chains, probably.

‘Still killing chimps?’

‘Please,’ Warren said.

‘She’s a lab tech,’ Lee said. ‘She couldn’t find the jugular if she Googled it.’

‘Biologist,’ Grace said. ‘They call us forensic biologists.’

‘Both of you.’ Warren held up his hands in a classic gesture of peace. ‘Lee, I’m sorry.’

He was siding with her. How could he side with her?

‘I want Grace to see this.’ His voice held a pleading note.

Lee narrowed her eyes, debating something with herself, and then whirled and went down an aisle. She walked past what appeared to be an ear floating in gelatin and stopped before a large metal container the size of a Crock-Pot, connected by a snarl of tubes to the wall. It was a bioreactor, for growing things. A monitor attached to the tubes beeped in a steady pulse, and Grace saw at the far end of the counter a printer spitting out a stream of data.

The human ear meant Lee was focusing now on an entirely different direction in her research, and it made Grace queasy. ‘What am I looking at?’ she said irritably.

Lee slid her hand over the outside of the bioreactor, caressing it. ‘First, a few thoughts. There are almost three hundred kids – just in America – waiting at any given time for a heart. Often a heart that never comes.’

‘And the neck bone’s connected to the chin bone. I know the stats, I know how many die waiting. Can you leave the theatrics for your Nobel prize speech and cut to the chase?’

Lee lifted her chin and looked at Warren. ‘She’s impossible.’

Grace thought she saw him nod in agreement and she snapped, ‘Good. I’m gone.’

Warren clamped a hand gently on her shoulder and she bit off her sarcasm when she saw the pain and tenderness in his face.

‘Grace. Please. I need your help.’ His voice was low and urgent. He was turned away from Lee so the researcher couldn’t hear their conversation, and Grace felt again the connection with this aging man. ‘I need you to see this.’