VIABLE (10 page)

He had opened his eyes a fraction. He was strapped to a gurney. The tall man was leaning forward to talk to the driver through a partition in the bulkhead, ignoring him for now. A tube snaking from a drip into his arm, presumably a sedative. It would explain why he had felt so light-headed, why the man in the back of the van with him seemed so relaxed. An automatic in a holster on his hip, within reach as he twisted forward on the bench seat to talk to his companion in the front.

He had managed to free a hand. But as he had reached for the handgun the tall man had noticed him. There had been a struggle and the gun had gone off. Then another gunshot, a searing pain in his abdomen. He thought he had managed to aim a single round at the driver of the van before he had passed out, no longer able to fight the effects of the sedative.

The next thing he remembered was waking up in hospital, a guard posted outside the door to his room. He had glanced at the medical charts that had been clipped to the base of his bed before he had fled. The bullet had taken out one of his kidneys and the transfusion had caused the other to fail. Well, at least one of his kidneys now seemed to be functioning again. He wondered whether the other one would heal. It didn’t matter. He could survive with a single kidney.

He had no idea who
El Conde
was or why the men had been sent for him. Was it possible that they knew? But how could they have found out? He didn’t think he had been careless, but he had been at Fallon a long time. Too long.

For now he needed to rest up, to give his body a few days to heal. Then he could think about what to do next.

12

AN
HOUR
AFTER she had left the lab Alison had cleared security and was waiting to board. She realized she hadn’t been this excited in a long time. What she had witnessed in Gant’s blood was truly amazing. Something was triggering his body to produce large quantities of stem cells, initially hematopoietic stem cells and later both HSCs and cells that showed similar characteristics to embryonic stem cells. The key would be to identify the signaling mechanisms in his blood, and assuming there was more than one factor, how they were working in concert to make his body respond to his injuries in the way it had. She had a two and a half hour flight to Denver, and then an hour layover before the three and a half hour flight to Baltimore, plenty of time to read through what the sheriff had given her and devise a set of tests that she could carry out on her return to the lab after Christmas. Hopefully by then Henrikssen would have caught up with Gant.

She boarded the plane and found her seat quickly, removing the thin file the sheriff had handed her before stowing her bag in the overhead bin. As soon as she was seated she grabbed a pad and a pen and started to jot some notes. If the sheriff’s theory was correct, Gant had been abducted while riding his motorbike. She checked the medical report from Mount Grant. There was no record of injuries consistent with a bike accident. The report showed that he had been shot, but according to the sheriff that had occurred later, while he was in the van. He must have stopped the bike. That made sense. If the sheriff was right the men who had abducted him needed him for something, most likely his blood; they would certainly have figured out how to get him into the van uninjured. Hadn’t the sheriff mentioned that the other men in the van had been wearing highway patrol uniforms? Gant might have been exhibiting symptoms of excitement or stress, but it was impossible to tell. He was after all a member of a special forces team and so he may not have reacted to being abducted in the way that a normal person might. She scribbled:

Prior to/at abduction – possible elevated heart rate/bp/adrenaline (??)

Gant had then been placed in the back of the van. At some point he had been sedated. She reached again for the medical records from Mount Grant. The blood report identified the sedative as methohexital. It was unclear when it had been administered but she guessed it would have been given to get him into the van. Methohexital was a fast acting barbiturate but its effects were short-lived. If Gant had been given a regular dose his liver would have started to remove it from his system within minutes. In the meantime however it would have suppressed his cardiovascular system, causing his breathing, heart rate and blood pressure to fall. Any adrenaline that had been in his system would quickly have been metabolized.

Underneath her first note, she continued:

Methohexital – heart rate/bp fall (briefly); adrenaline absorbed
.

And then the van had ended up at Mount Grant hospital. Fallon was less than seventy miles from Hawthorne – perhaps just over an hour’s drive. At some point during that hour Gant had been shot, and by the time the driver had driven to Mount Grant he had been unresponsive.

The cabin crew were going through their safety presentation, donning lifejackets and pointing out emergency exits, but Alison barely noticed. She was so engrossed with Gant’s file that she only realized they had taken off when the ‘Fasten Seat Belts’ sign went off and the man sitting next to her asked to get past her to go to the bathroom. She sat back in her seat, buckling the belt loosely around her waist.

Gant shouldn’t have been unconscious when they admitted him. His gunshot wound would almost certainly have caused him to go into shock, but it would take some time for him to lose consciousness, particularly given his age, level of fitness and military training. She flicked through the report again. The lab technician at Mount Grant had also found ketamine and benzodiazepine in his blood but had noted that those were the anesthetics administered by the hospital. Referring back to his charts, she confirmed that was the case.

However, it was possible that one or both of those drugs had also been given to him by the other men in the van. He would have started to come around from the methohexital after only a few minutes. If they had planned to transport him any distance it would have been necessary to administer a longer lasting sedative, or an anesthetic. Because it suppressed breathing less than other drugs, ketamine was often a preferred anesthetic when reliable ventilation equipment wasn’t available, such as when a patient needed to be transported by ambulance. Benzodiazepine was a common sedative, with longer lasting effect. Like methohexital, both drugs were readily available. As a third bullet point she wrote:

Patient further sedated once in van (??
)

She was sure that the sheriff had mentioned a list that he had made of the drugs found in the back of the van, but it wasn’t in the file he had given her. She added a note in the margin beside her third point:

Check with sheriff if ketamine/benzodiazepine found
.

Then there was the gunshot wound. She flicked back to Sue Ellis’s handwritten notes on the copy of his medical chart. The surgeon at Mount Grant had thought that he had been shot less than an hour before arriving at the OR. The drive from Salt Wells would have taken longer than that, which indicated that Gant had indeed been shot after he had got into the van. And the forensics report seemed to support the theory that he had been shot while he was strapped to the gurney. They had no way of knowing for sure whether this was before or after he had been sedated but she was prepared to bet that it was afterwards. If they had given him methohexital to get him into the van they would have needed to administer the second longer-lasting sedative fairly shortly thereafter.

The remainder of Gant’s history was well documented. He had been admitted to Mount Grant just after four p.m., the blood work completed quickly. Too quickly as it turned out, but she couldn’t blame Sue Ellis for that. There wouldn’t have been time to type and cross his blood and the
hh
phenotype was so rare that the possibility of it being an issue would have been discounted even if anyone at the hospital had thought to consider it. Then the transfusion – 4 units of O negative - followed almost immediately by the first indications of an acute hemolytic response: the increase in heart rate, the rapid, weak pulse, the drop in blood pressure, the uncontrollable bleeding from the wound site. The other symptoms - fever, chills, facial flushing, severe lumbar pain - would most likely have been masked by the fact that he had been anaesthetized. She saw from his records that Gant had been placed on an epinephrine drip to counteract the hypotension. She simply scribbled a new note under the last:

Adrenaline administered.

Satisfied that she had considered the external factors available from the evidence she turned to the blood tests both she and the technician at Mount Grant had run. If they were to be believed the results were simply amazing. The number of hematopoietic stem cells in the first sample was incredible, but it was the results of the second test that really interested her.

Embryonic stem cells had started to appear in Gant’s blood.

What were they doing there? Was it possible that his body had the ability to produce totipotent stem cells – an almost infinitely flexible type of cell – at will in order to repair damage to his body? And if so how was he doing it? Were these entirely new cells that his body was producing or were his existing cells de-differentiating, regressing to an earlier more plastic form? She warned herself again against getting carried away. She would of course need to verify every aspect of the process by which the samples had been obtained. Ideally she would take her own samples from Gant, assuming they were able to find him.

It suddenly occurred to her that she still didn’t know what the man looked like. There had been no photos in his file from Mount Grant but the sheriff had also left her with a copy of his medical records from Fallon. There might be something there. She opened the folder. On the second page was a photograph of Master Chief Carl Gant.

She felt her heart skip a beat.

The picture had been photocopied but there was no mistaking the face. It was the man who had approached her a couple of months before, just after term had started. He had seemed vaguely familiar at the time, as though she had seen him somewhere before. She had assumed at first it was because she must have seen him somewhere on campus, but somehow she knew that wasn’t it. And she hadn’t seen him since - she had been looking out for him. The more she had thought about it the more she had become convinced that she recognized him from somewhere else, but for the life of her she hadn’t been able to remember where she might have seen him. Now seeing the photocopy of his photo in the file made him seem even more familiar, as if for some strange reason he was more recognizable to her without those piercing green eyes.

She remembered now the subject he had wanted to discuss with her that day: enhanced regenerative capacity in humans. He had been trying to confide in her back then, and she had dismissed him. She was suddenly annoyed with herself. How often had she impressed upon her students the importance of keeping an open mind? Stem cell research was a new field with a short history, characterized by findings that a few short years before wouldn’t have seemed possible. And yet she had sent this man away when he had come to her with perhaps the key to what might prove the most important medical discovery of their generation.

She tried to remember if there was anything else from their brief encounter, anything that might be relevant. When he had mentioned human regenerative capabilities she had asked him to be more specific. He had mentioned recuperation but also something else. What was it? Not just the ability to repair but also improvements in eyesight and hearing. She flicked through the rest of his navy medical chart. His eyesight was slightly better than 20/20 but that really wasn’t unusual. She wondered what he had meant.

The pilot announced that the plane was coming into land at Denver and she replaced the files in her carry-on bag, fastening her seatbelt. Twenty minutes later she was in the terminal, with an hour before her next flight. Should she call the sheriff with what she remembered about Gant? It didn’t seem particularly relevant to his investigation but then it might help to convince him that the man was important. She dug out the card he had given her with his contact details, checking her watch. He should be back in Hawthorne by now.

She dialed the number he had given her for the sheriff’s office. A woman answered, polite but direct, her gravelly voice explaining that the sheriff was still on his way back. Did she want to leave her name and a number where he might reach her? As soon as Alison gave her name the woman told her to hold; the sheriff had left instructions to transfer any calls from her immediately. A moment later she heard him answer, a slight echo and the background hum of tires and engine confirming he was still at the wheel of his cruiser.

She quickly explained that she had met Gant before, that he had come to see her a few months ago to discuss a paper she had written on stem cell research, that he had been particularly interested in human regenerative capabilities, that she had only recognized him when she had looked through his naval records. As she was finishing it suddenly occurred to her that what she had told the sheriff sounded contrived. She had been worried that she had appeared over-excited about the possibilities that Gant presented when she had met the sheriff in the lab earlier. Would he now think she had made up this encounter to try and lend credibility to her claims?

The sheriff said nothing for a long moment.

‘You’re certain it was Gant that came to see you?’

She thought she detected a tone in his voice. Not disbelief exactly, but an edge, a skepticism. It was his job to probe for the truth. He would assume – correctly – that over the course of a few months literally hundreds of students would approach her with questions, topics for discussion. Even if he didn’t suspect her of fabricating the encounter he probably thought she was getting Gant confused with someone else.

‘Yes.’

‘Did he introduce himself as Carl Gant?’