The Select (50 page)

And then, behind him,
through the door to the basement stairs, Louis Verran thought he
heard a female voice shout
No!
But it was so faint he couldn't be sure he'd
actually heard it.

No matter. Southworth and Crawford
hadn't heard it. They were almost to the doors.

Keep going. Keep
going.

A dozen or so feet and they'd be
gone.

Half a dozen feet...

They were at the doors, passing
through...

A sound behind him. A door opening.
Verran turned and thought his heart was going to stop as his worst
nightmare became real: The Cleary broad, her shirt flapping open,
blood smeared around her mouth, bursting into the lobby. Verran
made a grab for her but he was far too slow. And he was too stunned
by the sight of her. Had that jerk Kurt tried something on her? And
if so, where the hell was he? What had happened
downstairs?

Not that it mattered. The end of his
cushy job at The Ingraham, and no doubt the end of his life as a
free man, was sprinting across the floor toward Southworth and
Crawford, screaming at the top of her lungs.

"Matt! Oh, God, Matt!
Matt, Matt,
Maaaaaaatt!
"

She leapt into Crawford's arm's and
they hugged like a long-lost sister and brother while she babbled a
mile a minute.

Suddenly Southworth was no longer low
key. He grabbed Alston by the shoulder, turned him around, and
shoved him back toward the security desk. Verran felt his stomach
acid explode and wanted a place to hide.

"Seems we've got a little
bit of a discrepancy here, Verran," Southworth said as he and the
others reached the desk. He stood two feet back from the counter
with his hand resting on the grip of his pistol—still in its
holster, but the meaning of the gesture was not lost on Verran.
"This young lady says she's Quinn Cleary—and Crawford here confirms
that—and she says Tim Brown is being held downstairs as a prisoner.
What the hell do
you
have to say about that?"

"Somebody call an ambulance," Cleary
was saying as she buttoned the front of her shirt. "Tim's hurt. He
needs help."

"Show me where," Crawford was saying.
"Maybe we can—"

"Everybody stay put!" Southworth said.
"I want some answers here."

The deputy was reaching for the radio
remote on his left hip when Verran heard that sound again—the
stairway door opening. Who was it going to be now? Brown himself?
This was turning into a goddamn circus.

No. It was Elliot. And oh shit, he had
a gun. He raised it in a professional two-handed grip and aimed it
at the deputy. But Verran saw the way the barrel wavered and knew
Elliot was on the edge of panic.

"Your gun, Southworth," Elliot said.
"Take it out and put it on the counter."

Southworth remained cool, didn't move.
"This isn't going to help," he said softly.

"Do it!" Elliot's voice cracked on the
first word.

Southworth's face looked more annoyed
than anything else as he removed his revolver from the holster and
placed it on the counter.

"Take it, Chief," Elliot said, then he
glanced at Alston. "And now I want to know what's gone down here.
When I went up to Fifth a little while ago, everything was under
control. I come back down and there's a dead guy in
Monitoring"—Cleary moaned and began to cry on Crawford's
shoulder—"and I find Kurt on the stairs with a chewed up ear and a
broken neck. What the fuck's happening?" He glanced back at Verran
again, then at Southworth's .38, still on the counter. "Go ahead,
Chief. Take the gun."

"I don't want it." As Elliot stared at
him wide eyed, Verran said, "It's over, Elliot."

"No way!" he said, shaking his head
violently. "I'm not going back inside! We can..."

And then he ran out of words as he
finally realized what Verran had known the instant he'd seen Quinn
Cleary dash into the lobby.

"No," Verran said softly. "We
can't."

Alston was moving. He reached around
Verran and picked up the .38 by the barrel.

"Louis is right, Elliot," Alston said.
"The dominoes have begun to fall." He turned to Southworth and
lifted the gun. "I'm going to borrow this, deputy. You may have it
back in a few minutes."

He strolled to the stairway door and
made his exit.

Fright and confusion swirled across
Elliot's face.

"What's he—?"

Verran jumped as a single gunshot from
the other side of the stairway door answered his
question.

"Oh, shit!" Elliot said.

And then he was running for the front
doors.

Before Elliot was through them,
Southworth had his radio in hand and was calling for back-up,
emergency medical assistance, and putting out an APB on Elliot. As
he returned the remote to his belt, he jabbed an index finger at
Verran.

"Stay put."

Verran could only nod. His whole world
was falling apart. He wished he had the guts to end it like Alston,
but knew he'd never be able to pull that trigger.

Strangely enough, his stomach didn't
feel so bad right now.

*

With Matt at her side, Quinn crowded
close behind Deputy Southworth as he headed for the
stairwell.

"We've got to get to Tim," she
said.

He couldn't be dead. She
didn't care what Elliot had said, Tim was alive. He was
alive
.

She kept repeating the phrase, hoping
that would make it true.

The deputy opened the door, looked
into the stairwell, then closed it again. His face was a shade
paler as he turned to them.

"We'd better take the
elevator."

Quinn clung to Matt as the deputy used
her security card to take them down to the basement. A residue of
the overwhelming joy she'd felt upon finding a familiar face in the
Science Center lobby still trickled through her anguish for Tim.
She couldn't get over Matt's being here. How had he managed to come
so quickly? Not important now. She'd find out later. Right now she
had to get to Tim.

"How was he when you left him?" Matt
said.

"He...he wasn't moving."

Deputy Southworth's expression was
grim as the car stopped and the doors began to slide
open.

"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."