“Ketamine we use all the time. It’s a sedative for patients undergoing surgery. It reduces the trauma and helps them forget the ordeal. But frankly, I’m not familiar with tetrodotoxin, at least I wasn’t until you called.”
“It’s the so-called zombie drug,” Sarah said. “What voodoo priests use in Haiti to fake people’s deaths, then revive them hours later.”
“Which may explain why we couldn’t get a pulse or heartbeat.”
“The right dosage lowers body temperature and reduces the pulse, heart rate, and blood pressure to a minimum—probably below what your machines could detect.”
“He looked it, stumbling out of here like he was moving on brain stem impulses alone,” Karen said. “So where the heck did he get puffer fish toxin? It’s certainly not anything we stock.”
“Because it has no medicinal benefit. It’s strictly a research compound.”
“So you think he broke into your lab?”
“Possibly.”
“Can you run that again?” Zack’s eyes were still fixed on the monitor.
“Sure,” Karen said, and restarted the video from the beginning.
When it got to where the man emerged from the bay, Zack hit the pause button.
The video stopped on a frame of the man in profile as he headed down the empty corridor toward the exit. It was grainy and hard to make out. “And you never got an ID on him?”
“He didn’t have any. Just pants and T-shirt. No wallet of IDs. No shoes or socks. His feet were bloody. He was also covered with bug bites and sand.”
“Sand?” Zack said.
69
Roman’s first impulse was to follow the woman out of the Neuroscience Research Center building. She was beautiful and shapely, and it would be fun tailing her butt. Except he knew who she was—Sarah Wyman, a postdoctoral research assistant at Tufts. Also a part-timer at a lab that, according to Norman Babcock, conducted the NDE project in a converted preacher’s home on the grounds of Gladstone’s church in Medfield.
It was the old guy in the office upstairs who held his interest. The name on the door said, “Dr. Morris J. Stern.” He didn’t know the nature of her relationship with him, but the way she looked when she left suggested that they’d had something of a dustup.
Whatever, Roman had some time on his hands, and keeping tabs on Stern seemed like a good idea. So he went back down to the lobby, where he hid behind a book he’d picked up on near-death experiences. He had never experienced one but wondered if there was anything to them. What he read sounded pretty silly—people floating around, looking down on their near-dead selves, and feeling love-happy. They all sounded similar yet deadly sincere. Nearly every one claimed that their dying wasn’t awful but wonderful, using words like “blissful,” “sweet,” “tender,” “sensuous,” “tranquil”—as though it felt so good, they didn’t want to go back to life.
But Roman was confused. While he gladly took Babcock’s money, he couldn’t understand Babcock’s outrage. Nearly every account went on about glorious encounters with beings of light, communicating mind to mind with “a loving omniscient presence,” which some called God and others Jesus. And they all claimed that the experiences transformed their lives for the better—made them more spiritual, loving, kinder, more in tune with the universe. Some NDEs even turned agnostics and atheists into believers.
So where was the blasphemy? Where was old Satan in all this?
70
They couldn’t go to the police without first gathering evidence linking the test victims to the lab. They would also need proof that Sarah had joined Proteus after they stopped using street people as guinea pigs. But that would take more time than they had. So Zack had Sarah drive them to Zack’s place, where he showered, changed, and packed some overnight clothes. Then they headed up Commonwealth Avenue to a dealership just beyond the BU campus, where he rented a Nissan Murano and drove to a parking lot on Longwood.
While Sarah waited in the car, he climbed to the third floor of the Goldenson Building on the Harvard Medical School campus. And just as the secretary had said when he called, she was in her office. Without knocking, Zack opened the door.
Elizabeth Luria jerked visibly in her chair, her face draining of color around her birthmark.
“Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.” He closed the door behind him.
She let out a small squeal as her mouth quivered for words.
He walked to her desk, which was covered with paperwork. “Back from the dead, and hotter than ever.”
“I can explain.”
“What, how you kidnapped me, then buried me alive? I’d really like to hear that, Elizabeth.”
“W-we needed just one more run to confirm merger, just that one, but I know how you refused. We were so close, I—I just felt desperate.”
“So you force-flatlined me and left me for dead for real. But I bet you got your data.”
Her face lit up. “Yes, yes. It’s remarkable. Really. It confirms—”
“Blah, blah, blah. Then you buried me alive.”
“That was an accident, I swear. We couldn’t revive you. Something went wrong. Maybe it was too early for another suspension. Maybe the sedative was still in your system. I don’t know.”
“But you tried, of course.”
Her face exaggerated itself. “Oh, God, we tried. Of course. Of course—injected you with epinephrine. Used defibrillator paddles over and over. Nothing worked, I swear. You had no heartbeat no matter what we did.”
“So, what I’m wondering is how hotshot neuroscientists with the most sophisticated MRI machine on the planet couldn’t see that my brain was still alive.”
“We couldn’t get a reading. Something went wrong.”
“But you confirmed that I transcended and merged with another sentience.”
“Yes.” Beads of perspiration had formed in the pockets under her eyes.
“And you buried me on Sagamore Beach.”
“Because that’s where you said you felt most spiritual.”
“A little déjà vu all over again.”
“Pardon me?”
“Just like my father.” As soon as he said that, he felt a sharp jab in his side.
“What?” She froze for a moment. Then her hand jerked toward the desk phone. But he reached over and yanked the wire out of the wall.
“If you yell for help, I’ll fucking kill you.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me why you killed my father.”
Again she hesitated, trying to gather herself. “We didn’t kill him. He died on the gurney.”
“He was still alive when you buried him.”
“What?”
“He clawed his way out,” he said. “EMTs brought him to Jordan Hospital with tetrodotoxin in his blood.”
Her mouth quivered as he described the security video. “We didn’t know.”
“Like you didn’t know with me.”
She made no response, looking overwhelmed.
He picked up a bronze brain-shaped trophy. According to the pedestal engraving, it was the Department of Neurology award to Luria for teaching excellence. He felt its solid heft, smacking it against his palm and thinking how it would feel to bash her face if she screamed.
“That was three years ago, before we had the MRI machine. We had no idea his brain was still alive. And that’s the truth.” On a shelf behind her was another photo of her son posing on a pony, with Elizabeth standing next to him beaming.
“So you just drove to Sagamore Beach and buried him in the sand.”
“Because that’s what he wanted. He entered the same place on the questionnaire.”
In spite of himself, Zack felt his throat thicken. Where they had felt most connected with the universe. Where they’d been the happiest as a family. “Except he dug himself out.” And Zack had relived it all in his head, then last night for real. “This was all a setup from the start. You had my father’s brain patterns on record, and when he died you went after me, hoping if I crossed over, I’d contact him. All because you wanted secrets of the dead. Well, you got it,” he said. “And the secret is he wasn’t dead.”