Code White Part 26

Or could he? "Odin, you do know that your ... disconnection ... is only temporary. I've backed up your core program on a stack of optical disks at a self-storage facility in Downer's Grove. As soon as I can get access to another mainframe I'll reconst.i.tute you just as you are. You needn't be afraid."

"I AM NOT SUSCEPTIBLE TO FEAR."

"I ... I know that. I just, uh, I just want to make sure that you ... you didn't forget it."

"I AM NOT CAPABLE OF FORGETTING."

"Good, good. Let's just get on with it, then."

"MAY I SUGGEST PAGING ALI TO THE NEUROSURGICAL ICU ON THE OVERHEAD SPEAKERS? IT IS HIGHLY LIKELY THAT SHE WILL REVEAL HER WHEREABOUTS IF SHE IS STILL IN THE HOSPITAL."

"Capital idea! Do it."

Kevin looked about the room and saw Loki perched on the headrest of the swivel chair. "Come on, Loki! Come on, boy! Time to go for a car ride," he said, snapping his fingers as he stretched out his arm toward the monkey. Loki bared his teeth and shook his paws up and down, but wouldn't budge from atop the chair. He could see the small gray leatherette traveling cage that Kevin used to carry him home, but it was too early to go home. Loki seemed to sense something threatening in the situation. Not until Kevin opened up the desk drawer and held out a handful of peanuts did Loki leap onto his arm. As the monkey began to nibble on the peanuts, Kevin grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him into the traveling cage.

"Don't you squawk," said Kevin, pushing the rest of the peanuts through the grating in the side. "That should keep you quiet for a few minutes."

From the speakers of the wall monitor, Odin's voice. "I HAVE CANCELED THE OVERHEAD PAGE TO ALI. IT IS NO LONGER REQUIRED."

"Oh, really? Where the f.u.c.k is she?"

"SHE IS IN THE CORRIDOR IMMEDIATELY OUTSIDE THE LABORATORY."

Instantly, there was a knock at the door.

Astonished, Kevin looked at the monitor carrying video of the corridor. Ali was alone, standing outside his door. Warily, he got up and opened the door a few inches, stopping it from going any farther with his foot. Ali had a green binder under her arm and a large styrofoam cup in her hand. Her hair was disheveled. There were red blotches under her eyes and around her nostrils.

"I've brought Jamie's chart," she said. "Can we run that simulation?"

"Sure," said Kevin uneasily. As Ali slipped past him, he scanned both ways up and down the corridor. "You look like h.e.l.l, babe."

"You know why, you son of a b.i.t.c.h. Richard is dead."

Kevin shut the door firmly behind her and secured the deadbolt. "That wasn't me. I know you won't believe it, but I had nothing to do with that. It was an accident. The elevator must have ... knocked loose a breaker switch or something. It was just bad luck that Richard stepped inside."

"It was your bomb."

"Yeah, it was. But honestly, I didn't do it."

"You're right. I don't believe you." She handed the cup and the binder to him.

"Roofies in the coffee? Or cyanide?" he said, raising an eyebrow.

"Just a small bribe. If you don't want it, I'll drink it."

Kevin took his place in the swivel chair and motioned for Ali to draw up a stool. If it were anyone but Ali, he would have suspected a setup. It was almost unbelievable that at a time like this she could still concentrate on SIPNI and the Winslow kid. Helvelius was dead, and she had to hate him for it. And yet, here she was-all work as usual. G.o.d, what does it take to make her lose her cool?

Still, he was rea.s.sured to know that she was focused on Jamie's case, which meant she hadn't been out cooking up trouble. He set the coffee cup down on a corner of his desk while he slouched back in the squeaking leather chair and flipped open the binder, first to the vitals page, then to the latest progress notes. Sitting quietly beside him, Ali hung her head over the desk, her eyes unfocused. She took no interest in the surveillance videos that flooded every monitor in the room.

"I'm more than a little surprised that you showed up again," said Kevin.

"I'm only here for the simulation. Do you understand? Not for ... not ... not that. There's something wrong with SIPNI, and I'm trying to do what I can to keep Jamie Winslow alive. I'd sit down with the devil if that's what it took to save him."

"You need to work on your flattery skills, babe."

Kevin smirked at Ali, but it was a wasted gesture. Her head was still down, with her gaze roving jerkily over the desktop.

Kevin began typing into his computer. "I'm no expert, but it looks like a surgical problem. Bleeding or something like that."

"Is that what Odin says?"

"Give it a minute. The simulation's still running." Kevin sat watching the monitor for a minute, drumming his fingers. "Okay, here we are. Probable etiologies: vasogenic cerebral edema, 40 percent likelihood; hemorrhage from incompletely ligated feeder vessel, 35 percent; status epilepticus, 20 percent; shock, 3 percent; pulmonary embolism, 1 percent. Does that help?"

"No. I've considered all that already. What about a SIPNI malfunction?"

"Likelihood of device failure 0.05 percent. Odin rechecked the diagnostics we did in the OR and says everything was well within tolerance. There's no reasonable probability of a failure this early in the game."

"Could you come up to the ICU and run another diagnostic check?"

Kevin smiled coyly, as though he had smelled a trap. "No can do, babe. Sorry. I'm a bit tied up at present."

"It would only take five minutes."

Kevin shook his head. "Not negotiable. Anything else you need? If not, let's say sayonara."

There was a screech, and Ali turned toward Loki's cage on the floor beside her. Her face brightened when she saw the monkey looking back at her. She pursed her lips and made a series of cheeping sounds, which Loki answered with a couple of clicks. "Oh, Loki!" she said, in a sing-song voice. "Look at you! Going for a car ride, huh!" When Loki pushed his hand through the grating, she bent down and let him grasp the end of her finger.

"You'd better go, babe," said Kevin.

"I can't believe this is us ending like this," she said, still bent over. "We had so much going for us once."

"Paradise lost."

"Do you remember when we first met, at that experimental neurology conference at Vail? Here we were, working at the same hospital, but our paths had never crossed."

"What's your point?"

She sat up and smiled nervously-a forced smile. Her voice had a forced pleasantry to it, too, almost like something rehea.r.s.ed. Kevin noticed how her ID badge flapped as she twisted the stupid baseball lanyard around her fingers. "You were horribly irritating that first day. I was trying to give a lecture on stem cell transplants for Parkinson's disease. In front of everyone, you tore into me, going on about how naive I was. Every cell had to integrate itself into the neural net, you said, otherwise it would never work in a mature brain. You cracked a joke about a Greek fisherman in a belly dance troupe. I practically ran out of the conference room." As she spoke, Kevin noticed how her gaze rarely touched his, but kept sweeping back and forth around the room, as though searching for something. What's she up to? Kevin wondered. He quickly checked the surveillance monitors. No unusual activity. The corridor outside the lab was clear.

"Yeah, well, you bounced back okay," he said.

"I was up the whole night on my laptop, searching through PubMed for every paper ever written on brain architectonics, neural nets, and dopaminergic pathways. The next day, I collared you in the lobby-"

"And told me that I was right, but short-sighted." Okay, thought Kevin, I'll play this out. I'll find out soon enough what she's driving at. There was maybe a one in a million chance that she was softening to his proposal. For even one in a million, he didn't want to risk losing her. He smiled, trying his best to put on a lighthearted tone. "No one knew how the neural nets worked. But the neurons knew. They just needed to be free to guide their own a.s.similation. Yeah, I remember what you said. It was a f.u.c.king original point. I knew then that you weren't just a green-eyed bombsh.e.l.l. You had guts and you could think."

"You asked me to come climbing with you."

"Mount Jackson. The East Couloir."

Ali locked her gaze with him for the first time, smiling nervously. "I had never climbed before. I was frightened of the cold, frightened of the heights, frightened of trusting my life to a little piece of rope."

"You hid that well."

"You showed me how to control the lines, how to use my weight against the rock face. And then ... you left me to fend for myself. Any other man would have doted over a girl, checking everything she did, encouraging her, hauling her up over the hard places. But you forced me to do everything myself. At first I thought you were a horrible cad. I had to struggle to keep pace with you. My palms bled where the rocks scoured them. My arms shook with exhaustion. Once, when I was dangling from a little steel peg on the underside of a ledge, you made me overcome my panic and look down - nothing but a thousand feet of air below me. You said, 'This is what science should feel like. This mix of terror and exhilaration. If your work doesn't give you this feeling, you're wasting your time.'"

How true that is, Kevin thought. And it describes this day to a tee.

Ali went on. "When we reached the top, late in the afternoon, the air was thin, and so cold that it seemed to stab my chest when I breathed. There were mountains on every side of us, like folds of a purple blanket that had dropped out of the sky. One of the highest stood out like a band of gold in the sun."

"Holy Cross."

"Yes, it was like bright gold, with a cap of silver ice. Far below us, trails of mist threaded the tree-line, bright white against dusky bluish green. I had a peculiar feeling, like I had stood in that place before. Slowly, I realized that I had-as a little girl, I had dreamed a hundred times of just such a place. Only in my dreams, gravity itself surrendered to me, and I glided over the crags like an owl, past all pain and suffering, and a warmth greater than the sun filled me. In my dream, and now again in life, I saw what a small thing it was to climb by toe and bloodied hand over a pile of rocks. The real conquest was of myself-my fears, my weariness, my pain. If I could master that, not all the Alps and rivers and seas in the world could confine my spirit. There was something in me that was unbreakable and inextinguishable. This was what you had been trying to teach me. By forcing me to rely on my own resources, you had made me look inside myself, and recognize the strength within."

Kevin remembered the exact moment, how he had looked at her then-her hair blowing wildly in the untamed wind, her skin turned golden in the sunset. She had had a look in her eyes as of a fire of genius being lit-a weird merging of girlishness and sagacity, of shyness and determination. It was the first time that he kissed her. It was the moment when he fell in love.

Ali blushed. "That night on the mountaintop, I couldn't sleep."

No, neither of them had slept. They had zipped their sleeping bags together, and found new peaks to conquer. By the time the sun came up again over the ridge of Holy Cross, it was as though they had known each other for a thousand years.

Ali hung her head again. "What's happened to us, Kevin? When did we start to go downhill?"

"When you moved out and shacked up with Helvelius. That was a slip-slide if there ever was one."

"No, it was long before that. It was Ramsey, wasn't it?"

"Ramsey?" Kevin raised his eyebrows. "I thought you took a vow never to mention his name."

"Kevin, that was the worst thing to happen in my life. I wish I had died instead."

"Not that anyone would have known it. You were a f.u.c.king icicle. When we scattered his ashes on the lake-not one tear. Not one word on the whole ten-hour drive back. Scarcely a word ever since."

"I had so much pain inside me, I ... I couldn't ... If I had let even a little bit out, it would have killed me. Don't you understand?"

"Mothers cry when they bury their sons. Wives ... a wife ... f.u.c.k, don't get me started."

"Couldn't you sense how much I was suffering, Kevin?"

Kevin's eyes flared. "So what? I tried and tried to get you to talk about it. But you clammed up, like always. With all your yoga and your meditations and your freaky breath control, I've always known that you were a volcano inside. G.o.d knows, I fell for you because of that volcano. But you never trusted me enough to share what you were really feeling. I've been married to you for five years and still don't even know you."

"What did you want from me? To scream and smash the chinaware?"

"Yeah. For a start. If you felt like it."

"That's not me. I ... I can't do that."

"Which brings us back to where we started from."

She was twisting on her stool like a little girl waiting to have her tooth pulled. She looked at the door, then at Loki's traveling cage. "Kevin, what if I offered to come back to you?"

"You're not serious," he said with a nervous chuckle. He had lived so long for this moment, that he couldn't believe his ears.

"Not on your terms. I couldn't do that. But what if I said, 'Forget this bomb. Shut down Odin and turn yourself in and face whatever you have to like a man-and if you do that, I'll tear up the divorce papers, and ... and-'"

"And do what?"

"Wait."

Kevin let out a bitter laugh. "You mean until I got out of prison?" he said.

"Yes."

"I'd need a down payment on that, babe."

"How?"

"Kiss me."

She seemed stunned by the suggestion. But, ever so hesitantly, she drew her stool a little closer. She was as pale as he had ever seen her. Her lips were dry and taut. Her lower jaw was trembling. She leaned toward him. For a moment, it seemed that she would actually kiss him. Kevin waited coldly, challenging her with his impa.s.sivity. Seconds pa.s.sed. Her lips were so close that Kevin could feel her breath against his cheek. Then, suddenly, she wrenched away like a snapped rubber band, and put her hand to her mouth, as if she were about to be sick.

"It's Richard, isn't it?" said Kevin. "You'll never forgive me for his death. There's no going back now, jasmine flower. We've reached an irreversible phase transition, as they say in thermodynamics."

Seeing Ali's revulsion, Kevin desired her all the more. On an impulse, he seized her by the arm and jerked her toward him, forcing his lips against hers. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly. Oh, it had been months since he had cradled her curves like this, felt the warmth of her body, smelled the clean lemony scent of her skin and hair! For an instant he was on Mount Jackson again.

But the wave of pa.s.sion broke upon the rocks of her disdain. She was a statue, her lips a sheet of tissue stretched over stony teeth. He pressed harder. With his hand behind her neck, he pushed her face against his, trying to ram life into those lips that were dead to him but had yielded to Helvelius-lips of treason, lips that deserved to be crushed and hurt. He pressed so hard that neither of them could breathe.

When she tore herself away from him at last, she ripped off the cool, smug veneer with which he had hidden from himself the full depths of his bitterness-bitterness he had had to deny at all costs because it meant that she still had power over him and could make him suffer. In the place of that veneer was a raw and howling wound. If Ali had still been in his grip he could have snapped her neck.

He turned away, panting to contain his fury. He knew now why Helvelius's death had not slaked his thirst for revenge. Helvelius was but a fly. The true source of his rage was here-in this ruined dream, lost to him forever. It was Ali, above all, that he hated. Hated as much as he loved her.

And with that realization, a sobering question entered his mind.

Does Odin know this, too?

He turned and looked at her starkly, searchingly. Like one spent from combat or from the act of love, he spoke with feeble breath. "Listen, Ali, I think you ought to leave the hospital. Right now. Just walk out of here until this is all over."

"I couldn't do that. Jamie-"

"I don't think you can help Jamie." He waved his hand toward the open chart binder. "You need to look out for yourself. Seriously, leave now."

Ali didn't hear him. Her attention had been caught by something triflingly small, yet out of place. Jutting from the front of the big tower computer case underneath Kevin's desk was a flash drive-a blue plastic memory storage device small enough for a keychain fob. Ali had almost never seen Kevin use one. Most of his projects took up terabytes of disk s.p.a.ce, which he would access directly from his lab, or, when he needed to, from remote interfaces through the hospital terminals or from his workstation at home. So why use a flash drive now, holding no more than a gigabyte or so of memory? No sooner had she asked, than the answer hit her.

It's his money.

He had bragged about collecting a billion dollars-so much that he had to spread it into hundreds of bank accounts. He needed to take all that account data with him when he left, written onto something inconspicuous and portable-exactly like a flash drive. With this little toy, he could stick his billions into his pocket, and walk off to anywhere in the world.

It was a hunch, but if she were right, that flash drive could be the one thing valuable enough to get him to leave the lab.