_Friday, April 10
7:04 A.M.
_
Stone felt his consciousness returning as the blast of an engine cut
through his sedative-induced reverie. Where was he? There were
vibrations all around him and a deafening roar that was slowly
spiraling upward in frequency and volume.
As the haze that engulfed his mind slowly began to dissipate, he
wondered if this wasn't more of the fantasy he'd been having, of flying
through some kind of multicolored space-time continuum. Or was he
waking up to something spectacularly real?
As he opened his eyes and looked around, he realized it was no dream.
He was in a cramped airline seat, strapped in with a black seat belt.
His head was gently secured to a headrest by a soft cotton scarf, but
his hands were free, lying in his lap.
Somebody had lifted him into the seat and strapped him down.
On his left was a Plexiglas window, and when he looked out, he saw the
earth beneath him begin falling away.
My God.
Then he realized he was in a white-and-gray helicopter that had just
lifted off from a rooftop helo pad. He watched spellbound quickly
coming awake, as the craft quickly began a flight path that circled
around and past the lower end of Manhattan.
Then he heard the pilot speaking curtly to an air controller somewhere
and he looked up and realized it was the same samurai bastard who'd
slugged him on the street and then aided in his kidnapping.
But that had to be yesterday, or God knows how many days ago. He was
realizing he'd just lost a chunk of his life.
And now he was being taken somewhere. In a very big hurry.
"Being up here always seems like being closer to God" came a voice from
behind him. He recognized it with a jolt. It was the man who thought he
was God.
Shakily he removed the scarf that had been holding his head and turned
around. Winston Bartlett was gazing down through his own plastic
window, seemingly talking to himself.
"What . . . what the hell is going on?" He could barely get the words
out.
"Oh," Bartlett said turning to look at him. "Good I particularly wanted
you to see this. It should help make my point."
Stone struggled to comprehend what was happening. He was with the man
he had wanted to call Father for nearly four decades, whether he could
admit that to himself or not. It could be the beginning of the kind of
bonding he had always hungered for, but he didn't want it like this.
They finally had a relationship, and it was completely antagonistic. He
had just been drugged and kidnapped by his own father, this after being
threatened and fired. Again, Daddy dearest.
So what was this evolving chapter about? Winston Bartlett, he knew,
could be ruthless, but he also was a visionary in his own way.
Then he remembered what had happened. He'd been trying to track down
Kristen.
"Where . . . where are we going?"
"We're going to the place you seem to find so interesting," Bartlett
declared over the din of the engine. "But I was hoping that we could
have a rational discourse along the way. What's been happening thus far
doesn't serve either of us. I'm hoping things have cooled down a bit
and we can call a truce."
Stone was still trying to clear his head, get the cobwebs away. It was
difficult. He'd lost consciousness in a town house in the Village, on
solid ground, and regained it here, where the earth itself seemed in
motion. And now Bartlett was trying out another bargaining style, so
even the rules appeared to be in flux.
"Look, down there." Bartlett was projecting through the din around them
and pointing toward the wide expanse of New York Harbor. "This
McDonnell Douglas is my Zendo, my monastery, and the world below is my
contemplative garden. I come up here to find peace. This is an
intersection of the great forces of nature, one of a finite number on
earth, where a mighty river returns to the salt sea from which it came.
These waters have flowed in the same cycle for millions, billions of
years, mingling, evaporating, separating again--just as life on this
planet continually replicates itself, growing and aging and dying, but
not before producing the seeds of its replacement. How can something be
at once both timeless and constantly changing? I ponder that a lot and
I always end up thinking of this river meeting the sea. Down there,
nature is a force unto itself, oblivious to good or evil, to human
desires or human laws."
Bartlett was doing a riff on some obsession of his own, Stone decided.
Or maybe it was some of the Zen philosophy that went along with
acquiring a world-class collection of samurai swords (if you believed
the published profiles).
All the same, looking down at the sprawling city and the harbor full of
ships, it was hard not to feel omnipotent and humble at the same time.
The thing Bartlett seemed to be getting at, though, was that nature
could not be told what to do. And he seemed to be on the verge of
declaring himself a part of that unbridled natural force, also powerful
enough to do whatever he pleased.
Now they were heading up the Hudson, teeming with early bird tourist
cruises and small single-masted sailboats. Bartlett paused to take in
the view with satisfaction. Finally he continued his monologue.
"I know we've had our differences, but I'm prepared to try to get past
that. I want to talk to you about something I always think of when I
fly across this river. Time. I call my obsession Time and the River.
Physicists will tell you that time should be thought of as a kind of
fourth dimension. Things are always at a certain place in three
dimensions, but when you describe the location of a subatomic particle,
for example, you also have to say when it was there. To locate it
accurately, you need four dimensions. We think of them all as rigid but
what if one of them could be made fluid? What if you could alter the
character of time?"
In spite of himself, Stone took the bait. "I don't know what this has
to do with anything. Nobody can alter the pace of time." He found
himself recalling a snippet of verse by John Donne:
_O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall!
_
"Strictly speaking, that's true," Bartlett said gravely, turning away
again to stare out the Plexiglas window, down into the morning space
below them. The Hudson was now a giant ribbon of blue heading north
into the mist. "But what if we could alter the clocks in our body to
make them run slower?" He smiled then pointed off to his left. "All
this below us has happened in a couple of hundred years. What will it
look like down there in another hundred years? Will we still need these
puny machines to fly, or will there be teleportation? Whatever it is,
what would you give to be around to see that? To have your own time
slow down while the world around you went on?"
Stone was looking out into space, wondering. . . not whether Winston
Bartlett was an egomaniacal madman but rather how truly mad he really
was.
Flying in the helicopter, he felt like Faust being shown the world by
Mephistopheles. Except here Satan was his own father, offering him a
teasing prospect of what it would be like to live on and on.
It would make a hell of a story. The problem was, miracles always came
with some kind of terrible price. What was the price this time?
Then he had another thought. Was that what had happened to Kristen? Was
she paying the price for some kind of hubris that pushed nature too
far? Nobody had claimed she had any kind of medical condition that
necessitated a stem cell intervention. So had she been experimenting
with some other procedure? Had Mephistopheles now called in his marker?
He wanted to ask but the vibration and the noise made his brain feel
like it was in a blender.
"Do you understand what I'm saying?" Bartlett went on. "Do you want to
be part of the most exciting development in the history of medicine?
Well, this is your chance. There is a majestic experiment under way.
But now we know it's not for the fainthearted. The question is, do you
want to live life or just write about it?"
"I think it's time I heard the whole story," Stone said finally,
forcing out the words. "What's your part in this 'experiment'?"
"I've put everything at risk, but now I'm this close to controlling the
clock. So . . . are you my son? My flesh and blood? Do you have the
balls to try it too?"
Stone suspected the question was rhetorical. He was already up to his
neck in whatever was going on. He just didn't yet know how big a part
of it he was. While he'd been sedated overnight, had they started
experiments on him?
He knew that some of the buzz about stem cells involved the fantasy
that someday they might be used to forestall the aging process.
Responsible researchers all said that they weren't trying to extend
life; they were only hoping to make a normal lifetime more livable.
Rejuvenative medicine. Winston Bartlett, however, had just taken stem
cell potential to its obvious conclusion; he was talking about doing
what others did not dare. Regenerative medicine.
"What would we give to be able to look forward to thousands of mornings
like this, ending it all only when we chose?" he declared his hands
sweeping over the dense green beneath them. "Time would become
something that merely flows endlessly through us, ever renewing. So-
called old age would cease to exist, at least for those with the
courage to take the necessary risks."
Now they were moving above the pine forests that comprised the outer
ring of the Greater New York suburbs, as below them the green wilds of
New Jersey, north of the GW Bridge, were sweeping by.
Hmmm, Stone pondered if a man somehow stopped growing older and nobody
else did, at some point he'd end up being the same "age " as his
grandchildren. That caused him to think again about Amy and wonder if
Bartlett would ever reconcile himself to her existence. . . .
A few minutes later, he looked down and saw a wide clearing in the
trees and a red-tile roof. They had arrived but from the air, the
Dorian Institute gave no clue to the momentous research going on
inside.
Bartlett said nothing as they began their descent, and in moments they
were settling onto the rooftop landing pad. The downdraft from the
rotor cleared away a few soggy leaves, which had somehow blown there,
and then the Japanese pilot cut the power and the sound died away. When
Bartlett opened the side door, the first thing Stone noticed was the
fresh, forest-scented morning air against his face.
He found himself wondering whether the roar of the engine had disturbed
the patients, but that was almost beside the point. The Dorian
Institute was not, he now realized, merely about using stem cell
technology to heal the sick. Bartlett had been letting him know that it
was also about an experiment that was much, much more profound.
In the silence that followed, Bartlett stepped onto the pad and lit a
thin, filtered cigar. (For somebody who'd just been talking about how
long it was possible to live, the act confounded credulity.) He took a
deep drag, then tossed it onto the paving and peered back through the
opening.
"Are you able to walk yet?"
"I think I can manage," Stone said. He actually wasn't sure at all. The
vibrations of the chopper had done serious damage to his sense of
equilibrium.
But he did find he could take small steps. As they moved to the
stairwell leading down to the third-floor elevator, Bartlett said, "I
know you've been here once before. You tried to sneak in. Grant saw you
and sent you packing. Well, this time you're here for real. The full
experience. We're going to start by taking you down to the lab and
checking you in."
The man, Stone suspected, was trying to hide everything that was going
on in his mind. He wanted to talk about grandiose themes, but his mind
was really somewhere else. Beneath all the braggadocio, there was the
smell of deep, abiding fear. Winston Bartlett was in some kind of major
denial.
"You know, life has been good to me," Bartlett declared as though
thinking out loud. "I've done and seen things most mortals can only
dream of. I'm sixty-seven, but I feel as though I've only just begun to
live. And that's what I intend to happen." He turned back to Stone.
"Whether I have a son to share this with remains to be seen."
A son? Stone glanced back at the man Bartlett had called
Ken, who was now shutting down the McDonnell Douglas. Maybe he was a
surrogate son for Bartlett. He was clearly a lot more than a bodyguard.
He'd been the one who nabbed Kristen and returned her to the
reservation. So what did he think of whatever was going on? Or what
about Ally's brother, Grant? He'd claimed he was the son Bartlett
longed for and had never had.
Winston Bartlett already had a surfeit of sons.
When they walked through the door and into the hallway of the third
floor, it was milling with the breakfast crowd, nurses and patients,
but no one took any special notice of Winston Bartlett, the man who had
made it all possible. Did they even know who he was? Stone wondered.
"We're going downstairs." Bartlett directed him toward the elevator.
"I'm still offering you a choice. You can be part of the biggest
medical advance in human history, or you can be just another
impediment."
Stone glanced at his watch. The hour was just shy of nine.
Where is Ally? What kind of procedure has she undergone? Is she okay?
He had to find her.
As they headed down, he felt like it was a descent into some pit of no
return. Winston Bartlett had not elaborated on what awaited down there.
It was as though he couldn't bring himself to face whatever it really
was.
What was the worst-case scenario at this point?
What he had to do was figure that out and then plan a countermove.