"Maybe you'd better let me—"
Quinn slipped through the doors as soon as the opening was wide enough to let her pass. She wasn't waiting for anybody.
She ran to the room where she'd been a prisoner and skidded to a halt at the door. Tim lay huddled against the angle of the wall and the floor, his back to her, one arm splayed out at an unnatural angle. He was perfectly still. She couldn't see his chest move. There was blood...
She screamed. "Tim!"
The body jerked, the limp arm stiffened, the thumb and pinky finger straightened, and waggled back and forth.
Quinn didn't know whether to laugh or to cry as she knelt beside him and slipped her arms around him.
"Oh, Tim."
TWENTY-FOUR
"Just a couple more questions," Deputy Southworth said.
Quinn fidgeted in her seat behind the counter. The police had taken over the security desk as a command center.
"Okay, but just a couple."
She was anxious to get over to the hospital and see Tim. The EMTs had wheeled him out of the basement on a gurney. He'd looked awful. She wondered how his x-rays had turned out.
Matt had gone along with Tim, and after they were on their way, the people from the morgue had removed the two bodies from the stairwell. The State Police led Louis Verran away in handcuffs. New nurses were brought in to care for the patients in Ward C. Things were settling down. Quinn had wanted to go with Matt and Tim but the deputy needed a statement.
"Now...is there anyone else you can think of who might be directly involved in this?"
"Only one." Quinn's throat constricted as the thought of him. "Dr. Emerson. He's over in the faculty building. Or at least he was."
She told him what had happened in his office.
Deputy Southworth stopped writing.
"Dr Emerson...first name Walter? Old guy?"
"That's him. Why?"
"He came through here shortly after we arrived. Took the elevator. Does he have an office upstairs?"
"A lab. On Fifth."
"I wonder why we haven't seen him. We've had people all over the fifth floor."
"He's probably locked in his lab." With the other rats. "But..." Quinn fished in a pocket for her key ring, then held it up. "I have the key."
She rose from her seat and started for the elevators.
"Wait a minute," Deputy Southworth said. "I'll take those."
Reluctantly, Quinn handed over the keys.
"All right," she said. "But I'm going with you. I want to be there when you arrest him."
Southworth smiled as they stepped into the elevator. "You've really got it in for him, don't you."
Quinn nodded grimly. She saw nothing amusing in his betrayal. She had put her life in Dr. Emerson's hands, and he'd handed her over to her executioners.
On Fifth, she led the deputy down the hall to Dr. Emerson's lab. The Christmas decorations on the walls and doors seemed hollow now, devoid of any warmth or meaning, almost sacrilegious. She stood close by Southworth's shoulder as he unlocked the door, and edged in behind him as he stepped through.
"There he is," she said as she saw the familiar figure sitting at one of the computer consoles. "That's him."
She slipped past Southworth and approached Dr. Emerson from the side. He didn't look up.
"It's all over, Dr. Emerson," she said, fighting the tears that sprang into her eyes, angry at her voice for teetering on the rim of a sob. She was supposed to be angry, vindictive. Why did she feel so sad? "It didn't work. I'm still around."
He didn't move, simply sat and stared at the screen.
Then Quinn noticed the chrome pole on the far side of him. And the bag of clear fluid suspended from it. And the clear plastic tubing running down into his arm.
She touched his shoulder, shook him gently. His body sagged and started to topple to the side.
"Holy—!" Southworth said. He lunged forward and caught Dr. Emerson's body before it fell.
Quinn stood frozen, staring at the computer screen and the words that had been entered there.
To Whom It May Concern: If my calculations prove correct, this should establish beyond a doubt that 9574 does indeed have an LD.
"'LD'?" Southworth said after easing Dr. Emerson to the floor.
"Lethal dose."
Quinn's voice sounded as empty as she felt. All her emotions seemed burned out, used up. She felt like a hollow, desiccated husk.
"Can I go now?" she said.
She needed very badly to be with Tim.
EPILOGUE
"Any news?" Quinn said as Matt stepped through the door to Tim's hospital room.
Late morning sunlight glared off the white of the bedsheets and the polished floor. She sat on the edge of the bed, holding Tim's hand, not simply because she was so glad to have him back, but because it was one way of keeping him in bed.
Tim was a lousy patient. He had six broken ribs, a cerebral concussion, and a large third-degree burn on his left thigh, but he wanted out of the hospital. Now. Only Quinn's restraining presence and the weakness of his atrophied muscles kept him in place.
He'd spent much of the morning explaining to the State Police and the FBI all he knew and what had happened to him. Quinn had been at his side, listening in awe to his incredible tale of mind control at The Ingraham and human experimentation on a national scale.
At first the various law-enforcement agents had seemed uniformly skeptical. But when they returned for follow-up questions after investigating Verran's control room and dismantling a few of the headboards in the dorm, they were obviously believers.
Matt waved a copy of the Baltimore Sun as he dropped into a chair. "KMI and the Kleederman Foundation are stonewalling. They say the charges are preposterous, and even if they should prove to be true, Kleederman and the directors know nothing."
Anger tightened in Quinn's chest.
"You mean he's going to get away with it?"
Matt shrugged. "I called my father and talked it over with him. He says unless some pivotal conspirator spills his guts, it's going to be rough getting convictions on the higher ups. After all, they're pretty well insulated and it's your word against a billionaire businessman with an international reputation, a former U. S. Senator, and the other big shots on the board."
Tim said, "I don't see Verran as the type to make a deal, do you? They haven't caught that Elliot guy yet, and Alston and Emerson removed themselves. We don't know who else was in on it here and who wasn't. And without written records, where does that leave us?"
"Probably with a lot of lower-echelon indictments, according to my father," Matt said. "But once they start asking questions around the KMI medical centers, someone's bound to crack, and then the truth anout the experimentation will come out and the whole network will collapse."
"And maybe the investigations will work their way back to Kleederman himself," Tim said, setting his jaw. "Criminal charges, civil suits, whatever they can do to hound that son of a bitch into the ground."
Quinn squeezed his hand. "Easy now." And then a thought struck her. "What about the graduates?"
"Right," Tim said softly. "What about them? All the 'Where Are They Now' docs. Those poor bastards."
"Why do you say that?" Quinn said.
"They're the real victims. None of it's their fault, but their reputations will be ruined or, at the very least, highly suspect."
"Don't count on it," Matt said. "They won't believe they've been brainwashed, and frankly, I doubt there's any way to prove that someone's been brainwashed. They'll say they were never affected by any silly science-fiction machine, or they'll say none of those contraptions were in their headboards when they were students at The Ingraham. And unless somebody turns up some written records, who's to say those SLI units or whatever they're called weren't installed last summer?"
"So they'll go on as they are?" Quinn said.
"They're still well-trained physicians. They'll go on giving the inner-city populations excellent medic
al care—even better care now that the patients they're subconsciously compelled to refer to the medical centers will no longer be pharmaceutical guinea pigs."
"So it's over?" Quinn said, finally letting the relief seep through her. "Really over?"
"For all intents and purposes, yes," Matt said. "You two pushed over the first domino. Just a matter of time now before they all go down. It's over."
New Medical School Opens
(Budapest) A new international charitable organization, The Eastern Europe Medical Care Foundation, has announced the opening of a tuition-free medical school in Budapest and a string of medical centers located in Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to bring the benefits of modern medical care to the poor, the disadvantaged, and the disconnected of Eastern Europe.
Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung
also by F. Paul Wilson
Repairman Jack
The Tomb
Legacies
Conspiracies
All the Rage
Hosts
The Haunted Air
Gateways
Crisscross
Infernal
Harbingers
Bloodline
By the Sword
Ground Zero
Fatal Error
The Dark at the End
Young Adult
Jack: Secret Histories
Jack: Secret Circles
Jack: Secret Vengeance
The Adversary Cycle
The Keep
The Tomb
The Touch
Reborn
Reprisal
Nightworld
The LaNague Federation Series
Healer
Wheels Within Wheels
An Enemy of The State
Dydeetown World
The Tery
Other Novels
Black Wind
Sibs
The Select
Virgin
Implant
Deep As the Marrow
Mirage (with Matthew J. Costello)
Nightkill (with Steven Spruill)
Masque (with Matthew J. Costello)
The Christmas Thingy
Sims
The Fifth Harmonic
Midnight Mass
Short Fiction
Soft & Others
The Barrens & Others
Aftershocks & Others
Quick Fixes - tales of Repairman Jack
Editor
Freak Show
Diagnosis:Terminal
F. Paul Wilson, The Select
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