The Select (12 page)

His grip was firm and his eyes
twinkled.

"Looks like you've gathered quite a
cheering section here," he said.

"It's been a long afternoon and we've
all become well acquainted."

"People seem to warm to you very
quickly. That's a valuable asset for a doctor. Don't lose it." He
gave her hand one final squeeze. "You can register officially here
in this office tomorrow. Welcome aboard."

Then he was gone, walking back down
the hall. And suddenly Marge and Claire and Evelyn were all over
her, hugging her, patting her on the back. Quinn stood in a daze,
barely aware of them. The full import of what she'd just been told
was seeping slowly through to her, like water soaking into a
sponge. She'd made it.

I'm in! I'm going to be a
doctor!

Christmas, New Year's Eve, her
sixteenth birthday, all at once. She felt tears spring into her
eyes as she glanced at Tim. He was still in his chair, legs
crossed, arms folded across his chest. Everything she'd read about
body language told her he was blocking something out—or locking
something in. But then he smiled and gave her a thumbs
up.

Quinn began to cry. Matt and Tim—such
good friends. They'd saved her life—or the closest thing to it. How
could she ever repay them?

She couldn't. Ever. But the least she
could do was call Matt and let him know the plan had
worked.

She broke away from the Admissions
Office ladies, thanked them with all her heart for their support,
then leaned over and kissed Tim on the forehead.

"Thank you," she whispered.

He seemed embarrassed. "Nothing to
it."

She turned back to the ladies and
waved. "I've got to call home and tell everybody the news. I'll see
you all tomorrow."

She ran for the phone booth in the
hall and dialed home.

MONITORING

Louis Verran sat amid his blinking
indicator lights, twitching meters, tangled wires, and flashing
read-outs, dreaming of France. He'd spent July in Nice, with side
trips to Camargue and Bourgogne. He'd gone alone, stayed
alone—except for those nights when he found a companion—and
returned alone. Four weeks had been plenty. As much as he loved
Nice and its people, he loved this room even more. All his toys
were here, and he missed them when he was away. He'd spent most of
August tuning up the electronics. Everything was working perfectly
now, everything set for another year. This was the way it was
supposed to be: everything under control, and all the controls at
his fingertips.

Get a life!
That was what his ex-wife had told him the last
time she'd walked out. Yeah, well, someday he would. When he
retired it would be to France. He spoke French like a native, loved
their wine, their cheese, their gustatorial abandon. They knew how
to
live
.
But until then, Monitoring was where he felt
truly alive.
This
was his life.

He was reaching for a fresh cigar when
Alston walked in with Senator Whitney. He shoved the cylinder out
of sight.

"There's been a change in the roster,"
Alston said. "Room 252 in the dorm won't be empty as originally
planned. We're sticking a female in there. Her name is Cleary,
Quinn."

Verran nodded. "No problem. It's all
tuned up and ready to go, just like the rest of dorm."

"Good," the senator said. He smoothed
the streaks of gray at his temples. "I want you to keep a close eye
on that girl for the first few months."

"Looking for anything in particular?"
Verran said, hoping for a clue.

"Anything out of the ordinary,"
Senator Whitney said. "Her advent is a bit unusual, so we just want
her under scrutiny for awhile."

"You got it."

Anything out of the
ordinary
.
Big
help. But when the senator said keep an extra close watch, he
didn't have to say why. The senator represented the folks who wrote
Verran's biweekly check, so Louis would get it done.
Pronto.

Verran tracked her down to one of the
pay phones in the Administration building. He had remote taps on
every phone in The Ingraham complex. Once he isolated the tap, he
adjusted his headphones and listened in.

The first Quinn Cleary
call was nothing special. 5.06 minutes to her mother, burbling and
sobbing over how happy she was about getting in at last. The
Irish-sounding mother wasn't exactly overjoyed. Didn't sound happy
at all, as a matter of fact. Strange. You'd think a mother would be
jumping for joy that her kid had just got herself a full ride to
the best medical school in the country—in the freaking
world
.

Well, you couldn't choose your
parents. Couldn't choose the name they gave you, either. What the
hell kind of first name was Quinn, anyway? It made Verran think of
Zorba the Greek. Some parents were weird. Louis's mother, for
instance. He shook his head sadly at the thought of her
tight-lipped mouth and wide, wild eyes. There was one lady who'd
been a few trestles shy of a full-length bridge.

The second call was more interesting.
To a guy named Matt Crawford. The name sounded familiar and Louis
had to smile when he checked it against the name of the kid who
hadn't showed today. Wouldn't tight-ass Alston like to know about
this. The little bitch had pulled a fast one on him.

Hadn't really broken any rules—bent a
couple into pretzels, maybe, but no harm done. And even if she had
trampled a few of Alston's rules, it made no nevermind to Verran.
In fact he kind of admired her ingenuity. She had what his father
used to call pluck. Verran wasn't sure exactly what pluck was, but
he was pretty sure this girl had it.

All the more reason to keep an eye on
her. Not just because the senator had said so, but because kids
with pluck were unpredictable. Louis Verran didn't like
unpredictability, and he loathed surprises.

She finished her call to Crawford and
left the hall phone. Verran cut the feed from the tap.

Yes, Miss Quinn Cleary could bend,
break, even mutilate all the Dr. Alston rules she wished, just so
long as she didn't mess with any of the Louis Verran rules. Those
were the ones that kept The Ingraham operating smoothly and
efficiently and, most crucially, quietly.

You've had your fun, Quinn Cleary, he
thought as he removed his headphones. Now be a good little med
student and keep your nose clean for the next four years and we'll
all love you. But if you don't, I'll know. And I'll land on you
like a ton of bricks.

FIRST SEMESTER

Second quarter sales reports place
Kleederman Pharmaceuticals firmly in the top spot as the
highest-grossing and most profitable pharmaceutical company in the
world.

The New York
Times

CHAPTER EIGHT

"I don't think I can go in
there."

Quinn couldn't believe she was
reacting like this. She stood with her knees locked and her back
pressed against the tiled wall of the hallway. She was afraid she'd
tip over and fall if she moved away from the wall. The tuna fish
sandwich she'd had for lunch seemed to be sitting in the back of
her throat; it wanted out. She hoped her panic wasn't evident to
the other first-year students passing by in their fresh gray lab
coats.

"Sure you can," Tim said. "There's
nothing to it. You just put one foot in front of the other
and—"

"There are dead bodies in there," she
said through her tightly clenched teeth. "Twenty-five of
them.

"Right. That's why they call it the
Anatomy Lab."

Quinn's euphoria at
becoming a member of The Ingraham's student body had been
short-lived. It had floated her along through the first night. All
sixteen women enrolled in The Ingraham—seventeen now with
Quinn—were housed in what they called Women's Country, a cluster of
rooms at the end of the south wing's second floor. The four women
The Ingraham originally had accepted into the new class already had
been paired off together. Since she couldn't very well move into
the room that had been allocated to Matt—despite the protestations
of the guy set to be Matt's roommate that he had absolutely
no
objections to bunking
with her—Quinn wound up with a room all to herself, which she did
not mind. In fact she liked the idea of having her own private
suite. But the daily maid service...she wondered if she'd ever get
used to that.

Her high lasted through most of the
following day's orientation lectures, but it began to thin when she
checked in at the student bookstore and received her microscope,
her dissection kit, and a three-foot stack of textbooks and
laboratory workbooks.

The last wisps were shredded by her
first anatomy lecture. The professors at The Ingraham weren't
holding back, weren't about to coddle anyone who might be a little
slow in adjusting. Their attitude was clear: they were addressing
the best of the best, the cream of the intellectual crop, and they
saw no reason why they shouldn't plunge into their subjects and
proceed at full speed. They covered enormous amounts of material in
an hour's time.

Quinn's concentration was taxed to the
limit that first morning. At U. Conn she'd had to put in her share
of crunch hours to get her grades, but all along she'd known she
was somewhere near the high end of the learning curve in her class.
The courses had been pitched to the center of that curve. She'd
sailed through them.

Perhaps the courses here too were
being pitched toward the center of a curve, but Quinn was quite
sure she was not at the upper end of this curve. She hoped she was
at least near the middle. She would not be sailing through these
courses. She'd be rowing. Rowing like crazy.

You're playing with the big boys now,
she told herself

But she'd handle it. She'd take
anything they threw at her and somehow find a way to toss it right
back at them.

Except perhaps a dead human
being.

She'd never really thought about the
fact that a good part of her first year would be spent dissecting a
human cadaver. Human Anatomy Lab had been an abstraction. She'd
grown up on a farm, for God's sake. She'd delivered calves on her
own and helped slaughter chickens, turkeys, and pigs for the table.
And in college she'd dissected her share of worms and frogs and
fish and fetal pigs and even a cat during Comparative Anatomy as an
undergrad. No problem. Well, the cat had posed a bit of a
problem—she'd known it had been a stray, but she couldn't help
wondering if it had ever belonged to someone, if somewhere a child
was still waiting for her kitty to come home. But she'd got past
that.

This was different.
Starting today she'd be dissecting a human being—slicing into,
peeling back, cutting away the tissues of something that once had
been
somebody
.
Intellectually, she'd been able to handle that, at least until
she'd approached the entrance to the Anatomy Lab, felt the sting of
the cool, dank, formaldehyde-laden air in her nostrils as the
double doors had swung open and closed, and caught a fleeting
glimpse of those rows of large, plastic-sheet-covered forms lumped
upon their tables under the bright banks of
fluorescents.

Suddenly the prospect was no longer
abstract. There were corpses under those sheets and she was going
to have to touch one. Put a knife right into it.

She didn't know if she could. And that
angered her. Why was she being so squeamish?

"Come on, Quinn," Tim said, taking her
elbow. "I'll be right beside you."

"I'll be okay," she said, shaking him
off and straightening herself away from the wall. She was not going
to be led into the lab like some sort of invalid. "I'm fine. It's
just...the smell got to me for a moment."

"Yeah. I know what you mean." Tim
grimaced. "It's pretty bad. But we'd better get used to it. We've
got three afternoons a week in there for the next two
semesters."

"Great." Quinn took a deep breath.
"Okay. Lead on, MacDuff."

"Easy:
Shakespeare—
Macbeth
—the eponymous character."

"If you say so."

As they pushed through the swinging
doors the formaldehyde hit her like a punch in the nose. Her eyes
watered, her nose began to run. She glanced at Tim. He was blinking
behind his shades and sniffing too.

He smiled at her, a bit weakly she
thought. "How you doing, Quinn?"

Quinn coughed. She swore she could
taste the formaldehyde. "They say we'll adjust. I'd like to believe
that."

Tim nodded. "Just be glad the air
conditioning's working. It's ninety-five outside. Can you imagine
what this place would be like if we had an extended power
failure?"

Quinn couldn't—didn't even want to
try.

She said, "Let's check the list and
see where we're—"

"I already did. Our table's over
here."

"
Our
table?"