Each door probably led to a corridor.
A dozen or so people were passing through, to and from the hallways, up
or down the stairs, to the bank of elevators. Most wore lab coats,
loose-fitting white pants, white shoes or sneakers. Only the guards, in
their jumpsuits, wore heavy-duty black shoes. A man in a white coat
passed by the two Asian women and said something; the two women reversed
course, back toward the laboratory. Obviously the man was someone
senior, someone in charge.
Two orderlies carried a stretcher across the lobby, on which an old man
in a pale blue hospital gown lay still.
Another patient in a hospital Johnny came through the lobby, moving from
corridor 3A to corridor 2B. This was a vigorous-looking young
middle-aged man of around fifty who hobbled as if he were in great pain.
What the hell was all this?
If Anna was indeed here, where was she?
This clinic was far larger, far busier, than he had imagined. Whatever
they were doing whatever the purpose was of those nightmarish specimens
in the basement, if indeed they had any bearing on the work being done
here there were a lot of people involved, both patients and doctors or
laboratory researchers.
She’s in here somewhere, I know she is.
But is she safe? Alive? If she’d discovered whatever horrible thing
was being done here, would they have let her live?
Must go. Must move it.
He walked through the atrium hurriedly, his face stern, a security guard
dispatched to check out a disturbance. He stopped at the entrance to
corridor 3B and inserted his key-card, hoping it gave him access to this
area.
The door lock clicked. He entered a long white corridor that could have
been in any hospital anywhere.
Among the many people passing by was a white-uniformed woman, presumably
a nurse, who appeared to be walking a small child on a leash.
It was as if she were walking a large, obedient dog.
Ben looked at the child more closely and realized from the papery skin,
the wrinkled and wizened face, that this was a little boy afflicted with
progeria, looking very much like the child in the photographs in the
father’s apartment he had so recently visited. He also looked like the
full-gj-own children, preserved in formaldehyde, in that nightmarish
basement room.
The boy walked like an old man, his gait wide-legged and rickety.
Ben’s fascination cooled to an icy anger.
The boy stopped in front of a door and waited patiently while the woman
holding the leash unlocked the door with a key on a loop around her
neck. The door led into a large glassed-in area fully visible from the
hall.
The long room behind the plate glass could have been a hospital nursery,
except that everyone inside was a progeric. There were seven or eight
little wizened children here. At first glance, Ben thought they were on
leashes, too; on closer inspection, he saw that each was connected to
some sort of clear plastic tube coming from his or her back. The tubes
were connected to shiny metal columns. It appeared that each child was
being kept on an intravenous drip through the tubing. They had no
eyebrows or eyelashes, their heads were small and shriveled, their skin
crepey. The few who were walking shuffled like old men.
Some squatted on the floor, quietly absorbed in games or puzzles. Two
of them were playing together, their tubes entangled. A little girl
with a long blond wig wandered aimlessly about the floor, chanting or
talking to herself, her words inaudible.
The Lenz Foundation.
A few selected progeric children were invited each year to the clinic.
No visitors were allowed.
This was no summer camp, no retreat. The children were being treated
like animals. They were, they had to be, human subjects in some sort of
experiment.
Children in the basement pickled in formaldehyde. Children being
treated like dogs.
A private sanatorium.
This was neither a sanatorium nor, he was sure, a clinic.
Then what was it? What kind of “science” was being done here?
Nauseated, he turned and continued down the hall until it came to an
end. To his left was a red door, locked, accessible only by keycard.
Unlike most of the other hallway doors he’d seen here, this door had no
window.
The door was unmarked. He knew he had to find out what lay behind it.
Ben inserted the guard’s key-card, but this time it did nothing.
Apparently this door required a different level of access.
Just as he turned away, the door came open.
A man in a white coat emerged, clutching a clipboard, a stethoscope
dangling out of one pocket. A doctor. The man glanced in curiously at
Ben, nodded, and held the door open for him. Ben passed through the
doorway.
He was not prepared for what he saw.
He was in a high-ceilinged room as big as a basketball court. The
vaulted stone ceiling and leaded stained-glass cathedral windows
appeared to be all that remained of the original architecture. The
floor plan indicated that this enormous chamber had originally been a
grand private chapel as big as a church. Ben wondered whether it had
later been used as the main factory floor. He estimated it was more
than a hundred feet long, maybe a hundred feet wide, the ceilings easily
thirty feet high.
Now it was clearly an immense medical facility. Yet at the same time it
looked almost like a health club, at once well equipped and spartan.
In one area of the room was a line of hospital beds, each separated from
the other by a curtain. Some of the beds were empty; on others, maybe
five or six of them, patients lay supine, connected to some sort of
monitor and IV stand.
In another area was a long row of black treadmills, each equipped with
an EKG monitor. On a few of them elderly men and women were running in
place, electrodes or probes sprouting from their arms and legs, necks
and heads.
Here and there were nurses’ stations, respirators, anesthesia equipment.
A dozen or so doctors and nurses observed, assisted, or bustled about.
All the way around the enormous room ran a catwalk, roughly twenty feet
above the floor and ten feet from the ceiling.
Ben realized that he had been standing at the room’s entrance for too
long. In a guard’s uniform, he had to act as if he were on assignment.
So he walked, slowly and purposefully, into the room, checking one side
and then another.
Sitting in a modern black-leather-and-steel chair was an old man. A
plastic tube was attached to one arm and connected to an IV stand. The
man was speaking on a phone, a folder of papers in his lap. Oh
Obviously he was a patient, but he was clearly engaged in some kind of
business.
In a few places the man’s hair had the downy look of a newborn’s. Around
the sides the hair was coarser, denser, and more luxuriant, white or
gray at the ends, but growing in black or dark brown.
And the man looked familiar. His face was often on the cover of Forbes
or Fortune, Ben thought. A businessman or investor, someone famous.
Yes! It had to be Ross Cameron, the so-called “sage of Santa Fe.” One
of the richest men in the world.
Ross Cameron. There was no question about it now.
Seated next to him was a much younger man whom Ben recognized right
away. This was unquestionably Arnold Carr, the fortyish software
billionaire and founder of Technocorp. Cameron and Carr were known to
be friends; Cameron was sort of Carr’s mentor or guru, kind of a
father-son relationship. Carr, too, was hooked up to an IV; he also was
speaking on the phone, obviously conducting business, though without any
papers.
Two legendary billionaires, sitting side by side like a couple of guys
in a barbershop.
In a “clinic” in the Austrian Alps.
Being infused with some kind of fluid.
Were they being studied? Treated for something? Something bizarre was
taking place here, something secret and important enough to require
fully armed security, important enough to kill people over.
A third man walked over to Cameron, said a few words in greeting. Ben
recognized the chairman of the Federal Reserve, now in his seventh
decade and among the most revered figures in Washington.
Nearby, a nurse adjusted a blood pressure cuff on well, it had to be Sir
Edward Downey, but he looked the way he had when he was England’s Prime
Minister, three decades ago.
Ben kept walking until he reached the treadmills, where a man and a
woman were running next to each other, talking, out of breath. They
each wore gray sweatpants and sweatshirts and white running shoes, and
both had electrodes taped to their foreheads, the backs of their heads
and necks, their arms and legs. The threadlike wires coming out of the