Dead On Arrival Page 31
She smiled.
“Hickam had it right.”
Now he smiled sadly, recalling his own lecture on Hickam’s dictum. It must have had an impact on her. “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please,” Lyle muttered.
“So true, right. It’s sheer and utter chaos, nothing so obvious and simple as Occam’s razor. What is doing us in? Everything. What can we do about it?” Then she looked at the monitor of the live feed from the National Mall, as if the image of people about to kill one another off made her point. “Hit pause. Anyhow, off you go.”
3:22
3:21
Lyle smiled grimly and let himself into the adjoining room. He stood with his arms crossed beside the chair with Alex. She did not smell good. Lyle couldn’t help but flash for a moment on his own hubris. He’d given himself too much credit. He supposed he’d prided himself in the past on the opposite. He’d tried to be humble and listen. He watched the clock count down.
When it was at two minutes, Lyle saw a hint of movement behind Jackie. It was the door to the research room. It jostled. Lyle banged on the mirror. “Jackie,” he said. “Jackie.” He waved, trying to distract her. She looked at him and walked to the window.
“It’s too late to change your mind,” she said.
“I need to talk to you, Jackie!”
“Do you mean it?” she asked, plaintive, hopeful.
1:30
Lyle put his hands on the window, as if urging her to put her hands against his. She did it.
The research room door burst open.
Jackie spun around. There stood Eleanor. She had a device in her hands, the defibrillator. She bulled forward. She crashed into Jackie. Boom! She zapped Jackie with major hits of electricity. The woman fell to the ground, seizing. Lyle exploded out of the room on the other side of the mirror.
“Lyle, are you okay? Where are we? How did you—”
“We’re almost out of time.” He ran to the keyboard.
:57
:56
Lyle had been studying the screen before and figured he had one shot to get it right, to stop this thing. On the top, he clicked on an icon that said program. Menu items materialized. He clicked on Fail-Safe.
A single word appeared.
Password.
:42
:41
“Lyle?”
Lyle froze over the keyboard. What if he got it wrong?
He started to type.
:29
:28
A few more letters. He held his finger over the enter key.
:18
:17
“Ahhhh!” It was Jackie. She’d somehow shaken off the electrical surge. She sprang forward, lurched past Eleanor, and knocked Lyle backward.
:12
:11
:10
She punched at him and kicked, spasmodic. Lyle threw her off. Sharply. She thudded to the side. Eleanor took the paddle to her again. Zap. Jackie seized, shivering with electricity.
:4
:3
Lyle scrambled to his feet. He put his hand over the keyboard.
:2
:1
Lyle hit the enter button.
Epilogue
“Anyone ever tell you not to fondle the pilot, Dr. Martin?”
“I’m just saying, there is no substitute for a careful, hands-on examination.”
The prop plane circled the southern edge of the Canadian Rockies. Eleanor Hall had the helm. Lyle sat in the bucket seat beside her, hand on her knee.
“Gorgeous. Not a soul out here for miles.” Eleanor caught herself after she said it and looked at him and smiled. “Not that I’m calling for wiping the planet clean of other human beings. Just a nice, quiet afternoon.”
“I could do without a newspaper for a few days.”
Three months later, the fallout from the Million Gun March had moved from the front pages. An explosive end had been averted, by the protesters themselves, after one among their ranks began discharging bullets at an empty police van. For a moment, the world watching, the fates swirled with indecision. Then a handful of other gun-toting protesters walked up to the shooter and convinced him to put down the gun. They turned him over to the cops. Silence swept over the Washington Mall.
The protesters raised their guns over their heads. In their ability to control their own, they had proclaimed their power. The next morning, they disbanded, claiming victory.
Each side returned to a stasis state, not the kind that Jackie had envisioned, not a dead one, but a living one. Ever threatening, sometimes exploding, often just on the edge. Cat and mouse, disease and immune system, the difference razor thin.
Lyle felt great relief, obviously, but little triumph in his role at stopping Jackie. Though if he’d allowed himself to admit it, his plan had been ingenious.
He’d realized that Jackie wanted him to go into the motel room to spare him the syndrome. He’d also figured out there was another way to protect someone from seizing: the use of the barbiturate phenobarbital. So he’d secretly slipped some of the drug into the soda he bought for Eleanor at In-N-Out Burger. It’s why she’d been knocked out. But it protected the pilot’s system when the electrical surge happened. When the syndrome hit Hawthorne, Eleanor had been saved.
Jackie didn’t know that. All she’d seen on camera was a comatose Eleanor. That was part of Lyle’s plan.
Lyle had left a note for Eleanor in the Miata, given her smelling salts before he’d gone into Lantern and hoped she’d revive in time to read the note, get the defibrillator, and take Jackie by surprise. Mission accomplished, with seconds to spare.
Then it had come down to figuring out the password.
Lyle always told his students: ask for a patient’s history and then really listen. When he’d asked Jackie for her final thoughts, he figured she’d tell him what was most important to her.
Hickam’s dictum.
Jackie couldn’t live in a world with myriad threats. To her, life and death struggled all the time, and she felt caught in between. Lyle understood it. For now, he could live with it just fine.
“How about there?” Eleanor asked. Up ahead a field that looked like it had been struck by fire a few years back. Little brush, no trees.
“Nice.”
“Can you turn the yellow knob there, Dr. Martin, helps lock the speed.”
“I’m not a pilot, Captain Hall. I just play one on TV.”
“Have you at least got the picnic basket?”
“Affirmative.”
She turned to Lyle and met his smile.
She guided the airplane with a soft bump into the open field, a grove of trees up ahead.
Acknowledgments
My deep thanks to my editor and friend, Peter Hubbard, and to my agent and sister-from-another-mother, Laurie Liss.
Thank you to Liate Stehlik, publisher at William Morrow, an authentic friend of writers, and leader of a group of like-minded and gracious editors, marketers, cover illustrators, publicists, and salespeople. Big fat thanks to Nick Amphlett.
I once again received terrific insight from The Council, the tight-knit group from the Stanford Medical School class of 1983 that includes my talented and beautiful wife, Dr. Meredith Jewel Barad. A special shout-out to Dr. Jen Babik, a brilliant infectious-disease specialist and the best shortstop I have a privilege to know personally.
Over the years, as I’ve sunk my 10,000-hours-plus into learning to write, I’ve been supported through advice and deed by some of the world’s best thriller writers. It is a collection of people who matches talent with generosity and class. You’ve taught me to pay it forward.
As always, my love to Meredith, Milo, and Mirabel, and to my parents, who generously support and encourage creative flights.
About the Author
Matt Richtel is a bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the New York Times. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Meredith, and their children, Milo and Mirabel.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, institutions, locales, or corporations are intended only to give this novel a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. The “Lantern” program is fictional, and the author knows of no plans or intentions for such a program at Google or any other entity. All other names, characters, places, dialogue, and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
dead on arrival. Copyright © 2017 by Matt Richtel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photograph © Vincenzo Lombardo/Getty Images (airplane window)
Cover images © Shutterstock (texture)
first edition
Digital Edition AUGUST 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-244329-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-244327-4
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