The Cicada Prophecy: A Medical Thriller - Science Fiction Technothriller Page 28

  By now Rick recognized the telltale signs of cyanide poisoning: acute shortness of breath, tachycardia, and flushed, deep-red skin—all indications that the delivery of oxygen was being blocked to the body’s cells. The almond-tasting Champagne that the Queens had mentioned earlier confirmed it. He knew if they didn’t receive first aid soon, there would be nothing more he could do for them. There was only one known antidote for cyanide poisoning: amyl nitrite, administered by an inhaler, followed by intravenous injections of sodium nitrite and sodium thiosulfate. Only the collective effect of these combined medicines could release the poison’s death grip on the oxygen molecules struggling to replenish the Queens’ rapidly dying cells.

  But as Mike and Rick moved into position, the Queens suddenly began foaming at the mouth, and then one-by-one, slumped over on their place settings—completely motionless. Grimly, Rick and Jennifer quickly checked their pulses and confirmed that their hearts had indeed stopped.

  Suddenly remembering Eva, Rick looked up and was surprised to see her sitting perfectly erect in her seat, ashen-faced and shell-shocked, but still very much alive.

  “Eva!” he cried, dispensing with any formalities. “Are you all right?”

  “I—I feel a little nauseous,” she volunteered tentatively, “but otherwise I think I’m okay.”

  “We need to get you to a hospital—this has obviously been a targeted attack on the Queens. We may need to pump your stomach. Come with me!”

  Without waiting for a reply, Rick took Eva’s arm and quickly led her to the street entrance, where he could hear the distinctive wail of emergency vehicles rapidly approaching. Within seconds, an ambulance pulled to a stop on the Broadway side of the building, and Rick motioned to the attendant as its rear doors swung open.

  “This woman may have been poisoned!” he said to the emergency medical technician as the driver quickly joined them at the rear of the vehicle. “I need you to take her to the nearest hospital immediately.” Looking at Eva, he added: “I’m coming with you.”

  “Rick,” Eva replied softly. “It’s all right—I’m okay. Obviously I didn’t receive the same poison as the others, otherwise I’d be feeling a lot worse than I am. I’m just sick to my stomach from fright. There’s no room in here anyway,” she said, looking around the tightly packed patient compartment. “I’m sure these gentlemen can take care of me on the way to the hospital. Why don’t you follow me in a cab, if you feel it’s absolutely necessary?”

  “All right,” Rick said, taking a few seconds to calm down and assess the situation. “I suppose that does make the most sense. Which hospital will you be taking her too?” he asked the driver, wanting to be absolutely certain of the address in case he lost them on route.

  “St. Luke’s/Roosevelt,” the driver replied. “It’s only seven blocks south.”

  “Fine, I’ll meet you there. Tell the attending physician to check for signs of cyanide food poisoning, and to perform a stomach evacuation if there’s any doubt.”

  The ambulance attendant nodded, then helped Eva onto the bed in the rear of the ambulance and shut the doors. Immediately, the siren began wailing and the ambulance pulled into heavy traffic and was gone before Rick could flag a taxi coming from the opposite direction.

  Across town, many miles away on the upper east side of Central Park, a mysterious figure in a white lab coat closed the door as he exited the Cryogenics Lab of Mount Sinai Medical Center then briskly walked toward the hospital’s main exit. In his hands, he clasped an object about the size of cell phone. As he emerged from the main doors and began his descent of the stairs leading onto Fifth Avenue, he pressed a red button on the device—and an enormous explosion emanated from the bowels of the hospital. Soon after, alarmed and frightened patients and staff began streaming out of the exit, as thick white smoke poured from the open portal.

  With a smug smile, the furtive figure crossed the avenue at 98th Street, and disappeared into the park.

  Part III

  The Missing Link

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  43

  When Rick arrived with Jennifer at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital a few minutes after the ambulance carrying Eva had departed Alice Tully Hall, he immediately went to the Emergency Department nursing desk to enquire about Eva’s status.

  “I’m Doctor Ross,” he said, flashing his Mount Sinai identification badge. “I’m here to see Eva Bronwen—can you tell me to which room she’s been taken?”

  The attending nurse looked at Rick blankly. “How do you spell her name?”

  “Bronwen: b-r-o-n-w-e-n. Please hurry—it’s urgent.”

  The nurse typed in the name on her computer, then looked up. “I’m sorry, Dr. Ross, no one by that name has been admitted to our hospital.”

  “What?!” Rick replied incredulously. “That’s impossible—the ambulance left minutes before I did, and it would have had much quicker access on route. There’s no chance I could have gotten here before they did.

  “Have you received a call from EMS?” he asked, knowing it was standard protocol for the attending paramedic to advise the incoming hospital of the patient’s condition and the estimated time of arrival.

  “No sir, I’m afraid not. Are you sure this is the hospital they were coming to?”

  “Yes—absolutely.” Rick looked over at Jennifer quizzically, and she nodded. Jennifer had arrived at curbside before the ambulance departed, and clearly remembered the closing conversation with the ambulance attendant.

  “Do you have the number for central ambulance dispatch?” Rick quickly asked the nurse.

  She checked a thick Rolodex beside her phone, then jotted a number down and handed it across the desk. Rick pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, and dialed the number.

  “Yes, this is Dr. Ross,” he said, as soon as the operator picked up on the other end. “I’m the attending physician for Eva Bronwen. She was just picked up by an ambulance at Lincoln Center a few minutes ago, but the receiving hospital has no record of her transit. Do you have information as to where she’s been taken?”

  There was a pause on the line while the operator checked her files.

  “We received an emergency call to send five ambulances to that location twenty minutes ago,” the operator replied, “but our records indicate that nobody was picked up. The paramedics who arrived on the scene found four DOAs, who have been referred to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. We have no record of any other transportation to or from this location in the last few hours.”

  “Are you certain?! Do you handle all EMS service in the city?”

  “Yes—all authorized emergency services are dispatched through this central switchboard.”

  Rick hung up the phone and looked at Jennifer with a stunned expression.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What did they say?”

  “They can’t find her anywhere in their system. There was no ambulance dispatch record of her pickup at that location. ”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Jennifer exclaimed. “What do you think we should do?”

  Rick thought for a moment, then suddenly looked up at Jennifer with alarm.

  Picking up his phone again, he dialed 911.

  “Yes, I’d like to report a missing person,” he said. “I have reason to believe the Queen has been kidnapped, in connection with the recent multiple murders at Lincoln Center. My name is Dr. Richard Ross. Could you put out an all-points-bulletin for a suspicious red ambulance in the mid-town area, and have the police contact me at this number as soon as possible?”

  Rick hung up the phone and looked at Jennifer. Neither one said a thing.

  44

/>   Late Sunday morning, Rick sat on his private terrace in a woolen sweater reading The New York Times, while a pot of fresh coffee brewed in the kitchen. He’d had an exhausting evening staying up late providing details to the police about Eva’s disappearance, and he was struggling to put together all the seemingly disconnected events of the past few weeks. First, the juvenile hormone patch had been secretly tampered with, leading to potentially disastrous consequences for millions of juveniles, then four of the Queens were murdered on the same evening as Eva’s kidnapping, and now, he had just read in the morning paper that the worldwide supply of human eggs had been destroyed in a carefully orchestrated simultaneous attack on the five official storage banks located around the globe.

  How could this all happen so quickly, and so easily? he thought. The Global Longevity Initiative had been brilliantly conceived, and meticulously planned and safeguarded: one carefully selected global supplier of juvenile hormone patches; five supposedly renewable queens; and decade’s worth of future egg supply carefully stored in secure cryobanks on five separate continents. Everybody thought the plan was foolproof and indestructible. But here it was, systematically falling apart, and within a thread of imploding completely. The one remaining link holding it all together—the last surviving queen—had been snatched from the relative safety of her protective cocoon, with no apparent means for replacing her and her indispensable supply of life-giving eggs. The recent tampering incident had demonstrated the fragility behind the central premise of the GLI—that it was possible to provide eternal health and longevity for the world’s juveniles by artificially suspending their physical development—because it showed that even the slightest interruption could potentially decimate the entire human population.

  What now? Rick thought. What would become of the human race? Three hundred million juveniles had to go on an untested regimen of adult hormones to save their lives—but for how long? It was all so new and unpredictable; Rick had an uneasy feeling about what lay ahead. And the rest of the world’s juveniles, who were still ostensibly ‘safe’ on their previous fixed doses of juvenile hormones—what would become of them? Could they someday awaken like so many dormant Cicadas, only to find they’d suddenly matured, with a short time to live? What would happen then? The entire human race, the most advanced civilization known to inhabit the universe, would disappear, possibly never to reemerge. It had taken billions of years of natural selection and random mutations to craft the human organism—what were the chances it could happen again? And what of all the artifacts and advances created by intelligent life over the course of man’s relatively short sojourn on earth? By the time nature could evolve another advanced life form of equivalent capacity, the geo-physical forces of erosion and entropy would likely have buried or obliterated everything we’d worked so hard to build and create.

  The prospect was simply too painful for Rick to consider, and leaning back in his chaise lounge chair he closed the paper, contemplating the next steps. Looking up beyond the rooftops of the city’s skyscrapers, he could see soft, white cumulus clouds slowly tracing across the pale blue sky.

  The forces of nature, he pondered, were immutable, and inexorably moving. In the greater scheme of things, whatever would happen, the tiny powers of man would be helpless to prevent. Maybe we’re just insignificant specks in a grand design after all, he thought. No more special than the lowly roundworm, or primitive bacteria. Maybe this was the natural and inevitable course of man, along with every other organism and random collection of molecules in the universe—destined to meld and grow into bright and impressive stars and satellites, only to eventually collapse and disappear into a black hole under the weight of their own hubris.

  As Rick mused over the meaning of life and the attendant forces of the universe, he was interrupted by the sound of his doorbell ringing five floors below. Who could this be at this early hour? he wondered. He didn’t have any appointments, and it was a bit early for deliveries. Plus, he’d told Jennifer that he hoped to sleep in today and have a bit of personal time to collect his thoughts. As he headed toward the stairs, he glanced toward his rooftop greenhouse and made a mental note to check the condition of his bonsai trees on the way back up.

  Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t think twice before opening his front door, but in view of the violent and unprecedented events of the past few weeks, he decided it was prudent this morning to look through the view hole first. Peering through the tiny convex lens, he could see an unfamiliar juvenile male wearing a crisp dark suit. Checking the periphery to ensure he was alone, Rick swung open the door.

  “May I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m Special Agent Luis Sanchez with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the visitor replied, flashing his identification badge. “I’ve been assigned to investigate the disappearance of Eva Bronwen, and I understand you may have some relevant information in the matter. I was hoping you might have a few minutes to share what you know with us.”

  “Yes, of course,” Rick said tentatively, “but I already gave a full statement to the police last night.”

  “I‘m aware of that,” Agent Sanchez continued. “But the case has been transferred to our jurisdiction, since it appears to be a kidnapping. I wanted to go over the details and see if you know anything else that could be helpful in locating her. May I come in?”

  “Yes,” Rick said, as he motioned to the left side of the foyer. “Please come into my sitting room. May I get you something to drink—perhaps a coffee?”

  “That would be fine, thank you. I’ll take it black, please.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Rick said, as he quickly ascended the stairs to his kitchen, where he poured two cups of coffee from the brewing pot. When he returned to the sitting room, he found Agent Sanchez studying the many pictures and photographs Rick had hanging on his wall, showing him with prominent public officials and dignitaries.

  “You seem to have known Ms. Bronwen very well,” Agent Sanchez commented, as Rick handed him his cup.

  “She was…is…my patient,” Rick said, catching himself. “I’ve known her since she was a child. She’s a very special woman.”

  “Yes, so I understand,” Agent Sanchez said, looking a little too long for Rick’s comfort at a picture of Eva in a long, tight-fitting ball gown, standing beside Rick at last year’s U.N. Gala. “All the more reason we need to find her before something else happens.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Rick replied, beginning to grow impatient. “How can I help you specifically, Agent Sanchez?”

  “Do you remember any distinguishing features of the ambulance that picked up Ms. Bronwen last night? Perhaps a partial license plate, or a vehicle identification number?”

  “As I mentioned to the officer last night, I was far too focused on getting Eva to the hospital as quickly as possible and advising the EMT of her condition, to notice any of that. All I know is that it was the standard red and white colors of the New York City ambulance service.”

  Agent Sanchez took out his black notepad and began making some notes. “And the ambulance attendants—did you recognize them from anywhere?”

  “I’m afraid not—though I did help the police artist develop a preliminary sketch of each of them.”

  “Yes, we’ve been given those. Did they act at all suspicious—” Agent Sanchez continued, “anything for instance that might suggest they might not be qualified paramedics or EMTs?”

  “Not that I could tell; they seemed to be wearing an official uniform. But I didn’t engage them in a very technical discussion, because Ms. Bronwen didn’t appear to be in imminent danger or having undue distress.”

  “I understand you took a taxi to the hospital immediately after the ambulance departed. Were you able to follow them?”

  “No, the ambulance disappeared beyond the stoplight by the time I was able to flag a cab.”

  “Did you see in which direction it headed?”

  “South, towards St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital,
where the EMTs said they were taking her.”

  “Of course it never arrived there,” Agent Sanchez announced dryly.

  “No,” Rick replied, growing increasingly irritated with the tone of Agent Sanchez’s questioning.

  “Do you know of anybody who would want to harm the Queen?” Sanchez asked, suddenly referring to Eva in the formal sense.

  “No, everybody I know admires and respects her tremendously. She has, after all, made a tremendous sacrifice to protect the continuity of our people.”

  “For juveniles, yes,” Sanchez remarked. “But for adults, I suspect she’s viewed as just another mature woman—albeit one with special privileges.”

  “She’s the only fully grown woman left on the face of the earth who’s still capable of reproducing—and producing eggs,” Rick replied testily.

  “Yes, and who could stand to benefit from that?”

  “It appears,” Rick said, referring to the morning headlines he’d just read concerning the cryobank explosions, “certain people are in a hurry to eliminate the supply of eggs, rather than protect them.”

  “So now Ms. Bronwen is the lone source of eggs, stored or otherwise?” Agent Sanchez asked.

  “That appears to be the case, yes.”

  “What do you know about Calvin James?” Sanchez said, suddenly shifting the focus of his examination. “As an adult male, would he not be interested in her reproductive abilities? It seems a little too co-incidental that he escaped from custody around the same time as these suspicious events.”

  “Yes—I was thinking the same thing.”

  “I understand you have a history with him?”

  “I’d hardly call it a history,” Rick contended. “We had a few run-ins while he and his band of followers were demonstrating outside my hospital and at the U.N., where I frequently attend official meetings.”

  “How long have you known him?”