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PROLOGUE
 
                 Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliances are relieved,
Or not at all.
Hamlet, ACT IV SCENE 3
 
The boss was dying.
 
He was losing weight, growing paler and thinner. And feeling an exhaustion no amount of sleep could relieve.
 
“Skipper,” he confided to his closest friend, “Boyd Penrose is a lousy liar.”
 
“Come on. He’s not the White House physician for nothing.”
 
“Listen, I’m dying and I know it.”
 
“No—”
 
“Yes, dammit. There’s a cold black wind tearing down the corridor of my chest. I can even hear the wings of the Angel of Death flapping in my bedroom when I’m left alone.”
 
“I’ll call Penrose.”
 
“No. If I can’t wring it out of him, nobody can.”
 
“We’ll double-team him. He can’t outface both of us.”
 
Forty-five minutes later a bedraggled Penrose, looking not at all like the admiral of the Navy that he was, stood straight-backed and tight-lipped in the regal bedroom.
 
“You rang, sir?” The physician injected his tone with as much sarcasm as he dared display to his powerful patient.
 
“Sit down, you lousy quack,” the sick man snapped.
 
The admiral obeyed.
 
“Come clean, Boyd,” Skipper demanded.
 
“You’re hiding something. Has he got some fatal condition you’re too chickenshit to divulge?”
 
Penrose was cowed. He lowered his head and sighed. “Skip, I wish to God you didn’t have to hear this.” The doctor had to summon the courage to continue. “He’s got lymphosarcoma—it’s a cancer of the blood and tissues.”
 
There was a shocked silence.
 
“All right, hold the sackcloth and ashes a minute,” said the patient at last, trying to camouflage his fear with bravado. “Let me hear the wretched details.” Turning to the physician, he asked, “What are my chances of recovery?”
 
“That’s just it, Boss,” Penrose answered. “This isn’t one of those numbers you get out of alive.”
Another silence.
 
“How long have I got?”
 
“About five, maybe six months at the outside.”
 
“Great. If I’m lucky, at least I’ll get my Christmas presents. Skip, be a pal and give me a shot of Jack Daniel’s. Pour one for yourself and Penrose too.”
 
“No, I can’t,” the doctor protested.
 
“Drink it, Boyd, goddammit. Show me I still have some authority around here.”
 
The Navy man acquiesced.
 
Skipper’s face was gray. “I don’t get it. Why are you guys taking this lying down? There must be some way of fighting this monster.”
 
They looked toward the doctor again. “As a matter of fact,” he confessed, “there are three different labs—Harvard, Stanford, and Rockefeller—that are all developing experimental drugs to combat this mother. But they’re still a long way from getting FDA approval.”
 
“Screw the formalities, Boyd,” the Boss growled. “The White House can get me anything we ask for.”
 
“No, no, it isn’t a question of just having the influence to get it, which I know you could swing. But once we do, there’s simply no way of knowing which of these techniques—if any—will do the job. And even if we could choose the best, we still wouldn’t know how much to administer. We might kill you then and there.”
 
“Okay. Strike the carpet-bombing approach. How do you decide which is the best gamble?”
 
Some color returned to Penrose’s face, perhaps because he finally felt there was something he could do.
 
“Well, I can call up a couple of heavyweights and, keeping total anonymity, find out what they think of the relative merits of the three medications.”
 
“Good idea. Why don’t you start right away,” Skipper suggested. “Use the Boss’s office. The phone’s secure. Only get us some answers.”
 
The moment the admiral departed, the patient turned to his companion and demanded, “Be a pal, Skipper, let me have a refill of that hooch and turn on my TV.”
 
Penrose was back in less than an hour. “I don’t believe it,” he mumbled, shaking his head.
 
“What exactly do you find so amazing?” Skipper demanded.
 
“The first choice of all the guys I called was the same character—Max Rudolph. He’s the immunologist at Harvard who’s developed those special mice.”
 
“Mice?” the sick man asked with exasperation. “What in hell’s name do mice have to do with my goddamn life?”
 
Penrose looked his patient straight in the eye and said softly, “They could save it.”
 
 
1
 
 
ADAM
 
Max Rudolph sat alone in his darkened penthouse lab at Harvard Medical School, staring into the velvet sky, waiting for signs of daybreak over the Charles River.
 
Having been informed that the blood and other tissue samples would be delivered at precisely six A.M., he had arrived early to be sure that none of the conscientious night owls on his staff would be working at their benches when the courier arrived.
 
There was a single exception: he had summoned his protégé, Adam Coopersmith, to meet him at five A.M.
 
Physically they made an odd couple: Max, mid-sixties, short, bespectacled, and almost bald. Adam, tall, wiry, with a shock of dark brown hair, younger-looking than his twenty-eight years, eyes still disconcertingly innocent.
 
“Max, you pulled me out of the operating room—this better be important.”
 
“It is,” his mentor announced.
 
“You sounded so mysterious on the phone. What the hell is going on?” Adam demanded.
 
“My boy,” Max answered gravely. “For the first time in our professional lives we’re going to do something unethical.”
 
Adam was startled. “Did I hear you right—you, who sprints after the mailman when he forgets to collect postage due on a letter?”
 
“A life is at stake,” the older man answered somberly. “Certain corners will have to be cut.”
 
“You’ve never done that.”
 
“Yes, but I’ve never had the President of the United States as a patient before.”
 
“What do you mean?”
 
“Admiral Penrose called me from the White House about a patient he described only as ‘a senior Washington personage.’ He insisted that I not ask any more.”
 
Max conveyed to Adam verbatim the medical information given on the phone by the Washington physician. And their awesome assignment.
 
“God, that’s an enormous responsibility.”
 
“I know, that’s why I had to share it with somebody.”
 
“Am I supposed to thank you for that?” Adam smiled.
 
They were interrupted by a loud grating sound at the end of the hall. They watched mutely as the elevator doors opened and a black-leather-jacketed creature of the night appeared. In one hand he carried a helmet and in the other a carton about the size of a cigar box.
 
“Dr. Rudolph?” he asked in a subdued monotone.
 
“Yes.”
 
“Do you have some sort of ID?”
 
Max pulled out his wallet and showed the envoy his driver’s license.
 
The courier checked it with a quick intense look, handed over the package, and quickly receded into the shadows. The two scientists exchanged glances.
 
“And it’s not even Halloween,” Max whispered. “Let’s get to work.”
 
They walked slowly down the corridor, an obstacle course of dry-ice chests, refrigerated centrifuges, and tanks of nitrogen, helium, and oxygen splayed chaotically like large metal tenpins.
 
Adam snapped on the lights of a room stacked floor to ceiling with cages of mice, all scampering to and fro, blissfully unaware of their unique qualities.
 
When transfused with human blood and other tissue, their systems became carbon copies of the donors. This meant reactions to whatever they were subsequently given were miniature but precise reflections of their human model.
 
“All right Adam, we have three possibilities. They could cure, kill, or even do nothing. What do you suggest?”
 
“Four sets of six mice each. We inject them all with the patient’s blood and then treat each group with varying strengths of the medications. The fourth crew obviously gets placebos.”
 
“But they still get their share of good cheese,” Max admonished.
 
Adam grinned. “Always the friend of the downtrodden.”
 
By seven-thirty, when day staff began to straggle in, they had already infected a third of the mice. To avoid arousing suspicion, they merely handed over case AC/1068/24 to the technicians who normally performed this sort of mundane procedure.
 
Adam called the obstetrics ward. He listened for a moment, and then announced with evident pleasure, “All’s well—eight pounds, eight ounces.”
 
“Lucky people,” the professor murmured.
 
As they descended in the elevator, Max permitted himself the luxury of a yawn.
 
“Shall we visit the House of Pancakes before we turn in?”
 
“Don’t do this to me,” Adam protested. “I promised Lisl I’d watch your cholesterol.”
 
“But we’re scientific outlaws at the moment.” Max laughed. “Can’t you let a nervous old man calm himself with some blintzes and sour cream?”
 
“No, ethics are one thing, but I don’t want to lose my best friend to a lipid-soaked pancake.”
 
“Okay.” Max sighed histrionically. “To salve your conscience I’ll eat them with margarine.”