A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [139]
“I do, yes. When this is all over, we’re going to this South Pacific island that’s covered from one end to the other with mattresses. I read about it in National Geographic. Sealy, Serta, Tempur-Pedics, all the best brands. Any word on a discharge?”
“Looks like today. Sometime this afternoon. I want to get back there to you guys. I miss you both so much.” Angie read Griff’s silence almost immediately. “Something’s the matter. What is it?”
More silence. Griff’s eyes begin to well and he wondered if he was going to be able to speak.
“It’s Melvin,” he finally managed. “He’s dead.”
Now the prolonged silence was from Angie’s side of the line.
“Tell me,” she said after a while.
Griff shared an abbreviated version of the events following her injury up to the plasmapheresis on J. R. Davis.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Griff,” she said when he had finished. “I am so sad and so sorry. What a terrific fellow he was. I know how close you two were. And I’m glad you got the man who killed him.”
“Thanks. As soon as we can, we’ll go visit his family in West Virginia.”
He looked over at the loaded syringes on a metal tray by his desk. It seemed almost wishful to be talking about their future.
“I do have a bit of good news,” he continued.
“Tell me, tell me.”
“Thanks to you and Melvin, I believe we’ve done it. According to Orion, I’ve got a workable antiviral treatment.”
He had hoped there would be more exuberance in his voice, but Angie understood and the excitement in her voice filled in for his lack of enthusiasm.
“Oh, Griff, that’s wonderful! I knew you could do it. I knew it!”
Griff hesitated. It was time to tell her.
“I still don’t know for certain that my conclusions will work.”
Not surprisingly, Angie sensed what was coming.
“I don’t understand.”
“Just that. All I know at this point is what Orion has told me, and he looks suspiciously like a computer.”
There was prolonged silence.
“Griff, what are you going to do?” she asked finally.
He could hear the apprehension in her voice.
“I need to be certain that I’m right, Ang,” he said. “We have a limited supply of Davis’s serum. He’s probably someplace a thousand miles away by now. The people in the Capitol are in serious trouble, and it’s getting worse fast. If we go there with what I have, and Orion is wrong for whatever reason, there’s no time to come back here and fool around.”
“Griff, I don’t like where this is going.”
“I need you to be with me, Angie. I need you more than you could ever know.”
“Griff, please…”
“I’m going to dose myself with the virus, and then I’m going to give myself the treatment.”
“No! There has to be another way.”
“If it doesn’t work, then I’ll leave you my notes and the serum. I don’t trust anybody but you with this information. You’ll come to Kalvesta with another research team and pick up where I left off. Maybe there’ll still be some people left in the Capitol we can help.”
“Try it on an animal—a monkey, a chimpanzee. If you’re wrong, you’ll die.”
“But I’m not wrong,” Griff said.
“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
He sighed.
“All these years I’ve been telling everyone who would listen that computers can supplant animal testing. It’s been my mantra—the one thing since my sister died that allowed me to work in virology. I’ve thought about this, Ang. It’s time to trust the program I’ve spent so much of my life developing. It’s time and it’s right. Now please, I need you to understand.”
“I … I do understand,” she said.
Griff could hear her crying. For a time, he cried with her.
“It’s going to work,” he said. “It has to.”
“I love you, Griff,” she sobbed. “I’ve loved you since the first day we met.”
“I love you too, Angie,” he said. “Just think about that island in the Pacific. All those palm trees growing up through those double-thick pillow-top mattresses.”
“Hammocks, too?”
Griff picked up the syringe filled with WRX3883 and saline.
“Hammocks, too,” he said. “All over the place.”
He had premixed the antiviral treatment based on the data from