"Go on," said Skyler.
"It's possible that the organs are required for something. Let's say the prototypes of the clones got the original rejuvenation treatment, that they underwent gene therapy. For a while, everything was going along great. They've arrested aging — they're feeling younger than ever. Then it started turning bad — it triggered premature aging. They try everything. A crash program in research, experiment with monkeys, experiment with child clones — you name it, they'll do it. The people they've sold this bill of goods to are turning ugly. But they come up empty-handed. One way to try to stop it, a last-ditch desperate measure, would be some kind of massive replacement of body parts. Not just heart or lung or kidney, but everything. It's called an organ block transplant. It's rare. The chances of success are not good. But… if you're desperate enough—"
"Christ," exclaimed Jude. "Is that really possible?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Then we've got to find the rest of them," said Skyler. "That's why they've taken the clones with them. We've got to find them before they're killed, too."
Tizzie turned off the microscope, straightened the lab, and they walked down the corridor back to her office.
"There're a lot of loose ends," said Jude. "For instance, these guys in the Group, like Tibbett and Eagleton — do they have clones?"
"Who knows," replied Tizzie. "My guess is that they do. But the clones would be too young to help them. You can't transfer an organ from a young child into a sixty-year-old man and expect it to work."
"Do you think" — Jude lowered his voice a notch—"that I have another clone? A young one?"
She was amazed that Jude could be thinking about himself at a time like this, that he'd missed the subtext of the conversation back in the lab. He should have been more concerned about Skyler.
"I think you probably had one. The question is: did they give him the treatment? Did he come down with progeria? If they didn't, he's probably alive somewhere. If they did, he's dead."
Jude fell quiet, then went off to the men's room.
Standing before the door to her office, Skyler looked directly into Tizzie's eyes.
"So the bottom line is, if I just got inoculations, maybe I have a chance. If it was gene therapy, I've had it."
She couldn't speak, so she just nodded — yes.
On Monday, an unaccountably pleasant day for mid July, Tizzie walked to work across to the East Side, feeling a glimmer of hope. Maybe, somehow, things would work out all right. Maybe they'd find the clones somehow and call in the "good" FBI. Maybe Skyler's sickness would lift, like those strains of malaria that recurred with less and less severity. Maybe they'd discover a vaccine and save her father.
Her thoughts darkened: that was a lot of "maybes."
She resolved to visit her father soon. It was hard on her, because he was failing so rapidly, and she didn't know what to do or say, standing there in his gloomy bedroom. She had never felt that kind of awkwardness in his presence before, and she knew where it came from: she couldn't forgive him for all the secrets that had been uncovered over the past two months. Still, she could pretend for his sake. In any case, she shouldn't let two weeks pass without seeing him. He needed her more than ever, now that her mother was gone.
The receptionist greeted her warmly, and her secretary brought her a steaming mug of coffee and placed it next to a stack of mail on her desk, fussing over her.
Five minutes later, the secretary poked her head in the door and said: "You've got an important call."
She picked up the receiver. It was St. Barnaby's Hospital in Milwaukee. The woman on the line had that kind of compassionate but straightforward voice that is accustomed to dispensing bad news.
"Ms. Tierney. I'm calling because your father was admitted to our hospital early this morning. He is not doing well, and I think it best — if you would like — for you to come see him — as soon as possible."
She added — unnecessarily, "He has been asking for you."
The secretary came in with an airline schedule as Tizzie scribbled down the address. It made her want to scream: St. Barnaby's. Room 14B. The Samuel Billington Pavilion.
She barely had time to call Jude before she left for the airport. He didn't want her to go — too dangerous — but she wasn't going to risk arriving too late, the way she had with her mother. She promised she'd be careful.
At the hospital, they seemed to expect her. She walked in, holding in her hand the scrap of paper with the room number on it, and before she spoke, the receptionist gave her complicated directions, involving a change of elevators and walkways through atriums filled with potted palms. The Billington Pavilion was lavish, with a chrome-covered elevator bank and a nurse's station done in travertine marble of rough-hewn edges. Fourteen B occupied a full corner at the end of a corridor, and it turned out to be not a single room but a three-room suite that looked like hotel accommodations. A woman in a sky-blue uniform showed her the way and motioned her into a sitting room with easy chairs done up in chintz.
She didn't sit down. She threw her jacket on the chair and opened the door to the adjoining room, which was dim, the only light coming through the slats of blinds drawn across the window. The bed was at the center of the wall, so imposing that it seemed to be the only furniture in the room. She could hear machines going, and also the thin, reedy sound that she took a moment to identify — her father's breathing.
There was no one else there — only him.
His eyes were closed, their lids seemingly quivering. His head was sunk into a large pillow, and the indentation made it look heavy, like a small, hard melon submerged in a canopy of white-tufted milkweed. He looked so frail and even puny—that was the horrible word that kept intruding into her mind.
She pulled a chair up and sat next to him and watched him. That might have been a mistake, looking at him like that for such a long period of time. Her thoughts began to drift. She didn't know what she felt, now that the time had come. He didn't look like himself, this wizened pile of flesh and bone. Was he really her father? Could he really have been part of that whole horrible scheme — he who used to tuck her into bed at night and keep the monsters at bay by telling her stories in a loving monotone until she fell asleep? Was the monster — in fact — him?
Something touched her hand, and she jumped, startled. It was his hand. She held it and looked at him — his pink, watery eyes open, staring at her. He looked lucid. He licked his lips — he wanted to talk.
Was this it? Deathbed communication. The stuff of literature, the time for honesty and absolution. It felt so strange, sitting there, holding his bony hand, feeling so much and so many contradictory things, loving him and despising him for what he'd done. She felt outside the whole situation, outside everything that was happening. It scared her to feel so cut off.
His labored breathing made it hard to understand him. She poured him a glass of ice water and lifted it to him in a bent straw, holding him up gently by the back. He weighed so little, it was like lifting the pillow.
His lips moved, so she leaned down and put her ear to his mouth, feeling his hot breath as he formed the words.
"You know everything."
Was it a declaration or a question? She couldn't tell.
"Yes," she said. "Everything but why."
He was quiet so long, she wasn't sure her answer had registered.
But then he began to talk, at first slowly, and then with more urgency as he rallied to tell her everything.
"It was for you. All for you. We wanted to give you a gift. We gave you life, and we wanted to give you more life. It was going to be so beautiful, so perfect. The first ones ever. You were going to live it — not wish for it, not dream about it. But live it."