As she parked in her driveway, she checked out her street. No deceptively non-event cars parked in the vicinity. So she probably had been watched.
It took her three trips to get all her bags into the house, the snow squeaking under the treads of her running shoes, the flakes falling from the sky getting into her eyes as the cold wind swirled around. After locking up her car and locking herself inside, she went into the kitchen, waded through the bags and put stuff away. Her grocery purchasing inefficiency had never registered before, but now she saw her three different stops as an adaptive behavior to waste otherwise empty hours.
On the weekends, the less time she had to stare at the walls of her little house, the better.
Of course, now that the FBI seemed interested in her, she had something to focus on. Not exactly the distraction she had been looking for, however.
On that note …
Setting her security alarm, Sarah went down into her basement. Other than the washer and dryer and the water heater, there wasn’t much, just a couple of boxes of her university papers and some leftover dorm room stuff that hadn’t gone well with her and Gerry’s this-is-real-life furniture upstairs.
The old laptop she was looking for was in a Rubbermaid tub next to the futon she’d used for all four years of college and her postgraduate work. “Old” was a misnomer for the Dell. She’d bought the thing only about five years ago, and it was fully functioning—“obsolete” was a better term given the speed of technology’s changes.
Sitting on the futon, she plugged the charger in and opened the laptop. Boot up didn’t take long and she entered her password.
As she inserted the USB drive she’d taken from the safety deposit box, she was aware of her heart pounding, and her eyes flipped up and surveyed the basement. Nope, still no windows. And no one was creeping down the cellar stairs. Or staring over her shoulder.
The drive’s directory was not password protected, which was a surprise. Then again, Gerry had stored the thing in a safety deposit box only he could get into. Scrolling down the list of files, she found dozens of differently titled entries and a variety of programs used, all of the latter standard for medical research, from Excel spreadsheets to Word documents to images.
What was the same in every single entry? They had all been added the day before Gerry’s death.
Sarah closed her eyes and thought about the last of his signatures on the safety deposit box envelope.
Then she refocused. One by one, she went down the list of files. The identifying numbers and combinations of letters seemed to follow the same system she and everyone else used at BioMed to identify research protocols. Accordingly, there was nothing that gave away any hint of the subject matter if you were a layperson—or a professional one unaffiliated with the project, for that matter.
Three hundred and seventy-two files.
When she came to the final listing, she rubbed the pain behind her sternum. Once again, she had expected something with her name on it, a sign that he had left this drive not just for anyone, but for her to find. Instead, it looked like he had copied these for himself.
As she prepared to start opening things, her scientific brain insisted on finding order, and when there wasn’t an obvious one in the directory, she started at the top.
Lab results. From a complete blood panel.
Except … the patient in question had readings that made no sense. Values for liver function were completely off. Thyroid. White and red blood cell counts made no sense. Plasma was … she’d never even seen a reading like this. Iron was so high the patient should have been dead.
She read the values twice and then tried to get a bead on where the rundown had come from. No patient name. No ordering physician name. No laboratory or hospital logo, not even a BioMed one. All there was was an eight-digit reference number, which she guessed identified the patient, and a date, which was about six months before Gerry died.
The next file included images from a CAT scan series of the upper torso—
“What the … hell … is this?”
The heart appeared to be six-chambered, not four-. And yet the ribs, lungs, stomach, liver, and other internal organs and spine were recognizably human.
It was conceivable that a patient, somewhere on the planet, could have a mutated heart like that. The surprise was why Gerry, as an infectious disease researcher, would have the files pertaining to a case like that.
Would have stolen the files to a case like that.
Sarah frowned and went back to the CBC results. The eight-digit reference number on that report … yup, it matched the one on the CAT scan series.
In quick succession, she opened the next six files. All medical results. But then came the seventh, and by the time she was finished reading that one, she had to sit back and take some deep breaths. When that didn’t help, she put the laptop aside and rubbed her eyes.
She literally couldn’t breathe right.
Those medical results? All normal screening tests on a male patient with totally abnormal readings. Urinalysis. Cardiac catheterization. Stress test with echocardiogram, where she watched that six-chamber heart beat.
But the seventh file was so disturbing, she’d had to read the document three times. At first, it appeared to be a fairly standard report on a patient, with a review of the test results that seemed to be the ones she’d just opened. Then words like “major histocompatibility profile assessment” and “immunosuppression protocol” jumped out, and she recognized the names of anti-rejection drugs that helped transplant patients’ bodies accept the new organs they’d been given.
All of which were topics well familiar to her and close to her field of work.
And just as she’d wondered why Gerry hadn’t mentioned all this work to her, given the synergies with her own efforts, she read the following line: “Intravenous administration of the ALL cells occurred at 15:35.”
There was only one thing that ALL stood for in Sarah’s world.
Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.
If she was reading this right, and she was hard-pressed to come up with an alternative interpretation, someone at BioMed had injected a human patient with cancer cells after they deliberately depressed his immune system.
They were torturing someone under the guise of medical advancement.
As John Matthew came out of the hidden door under the Black Dagger Brotherhood mansion’s grand staircase, he smelled First Meal being prepared off in the kitchen wing—and attempted to ground himself in the familiar.
This was just like any other night. Nothing unusual. No out-of-whack going on anywhere.
It was an okay enough pep talk and one he’d been giving himself all through his workout down in the training center. The goal was to convince the warning bells in his head that they were wasting their time with all that high-pitched ringing.
Too bad his success rate was zero. Like a tour guide taking a group past a dead body and going, “Nothing to see here, we’re walking, we’re walking.”
Crossing over the mosaic depiction of that apple tree in full bloom, he hit the blood-red runner that went up the ornate staircase and felt like he was dragging a car behind him as he ascended. He hated the fatigue. The fact that he’d put himself through a brutal series of dead lifts and then run sixteen miles in under an hour and a half didn’t matter. His motivation in the gym had been to prove to himself that the bite on his shoulder wasn’t a systemic issue, and the exhaustion he was now feeling made him worried that it was.