Under the Knife(99)

Shit.

He glanced toward the door and checked his phone for the signal from Wu’s device. Still blocked, useless for tracking.

Shit!

Where could she have gone?

If he didn’t find her soon, he was as good as fucked.





SPENCER


The picture on his computer screen looked like ones Spencer had seen of the Milky Way from space, the way it could no longer be seen in the night sky unless you were somewhere like Antarctica, maybe, or out in the middle of the Pacific: countless tiny white dots, merging together into random bunches and blobs flung against a dark background.

“What is that?” Spencer asked, almost jumping out of his chair. He could barely contain his excitement.

“Hell if I know,” Raj said from the small frame in the upper right-hand corner of Spencer’s desktop computer screen, the only portion of the screen not occupied by Rita’s brain MRI. “Millions of tiny particles, clustered around her left tympanic membrane, vestibulocochlear nerve, and lateral brainstem. Very small. I played with the contrast settings to make them look bright white. Easier to see that way.”

Spencer pulled at his chin. “How small?”

“Each no bigger than a small protein. With some associated hemorrhage and inflammation. We’d never be able to see them unless I’d scrubbed the images with the latest version of our software.”

“What are they made of?”

“Not sure. Best guess: mostly organic, but with bits of synthetic material as well.”

“What are they doing there?”

“Hell if I know. Infection, maybe?”

“Well … prion diseases are protein-based, I suppose. Spongiform encephalopathies.”

“You mean, like mad cow? Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease? That could explain it. Doesn’t Creutzfeldt-Jacob cause dementia?”

“Yeah, it does, but not like this. CJD doesn’t fit the clinical picture. This”—Spencer tapped the screen with his finger—“is just plain weird. Especially if these things are not entirely organic.” Her MRI was now raising more questions than it was answering. “Maybe something will come up in her blood tests. And the portable EEG.”

“That’s another weird thing about this: the portable EEGs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your EEG signal got totally screwed up today. Twice. The first time around”—Raj’s eyes flickered downward, and Spencer heard paper shuffling over the link—“10:00 A.M.”

“That’s when I went to Rita’s OR.”

“Correct. Bad interference. Until you turned it off. And when you turned it back on—”

“—by then I was in Higdon, with you—”

“—it was fine. Until the same thing happened again about three hours later—”

“—when I was visiting Rita in the ER—”

“—and the signal went completely on the fritz again.”

“So … my EEG went haywire whenever I was around Rita?” Spencer asked.

“Correct.”

“Why?”

“High-energy electromagnetic waves interfering with your signal.”

“Where from?”

“From Rita.”

“What?”

“Let me show you what I mean.” Raj reached to his right. A picture of a horizontal squiggly line replaced Rita’s MRI on Spencer’s screen.

“What’s that?” Spencer asked. “Looks like an EEG pattern.”

“It is. Yours. The one your brain was transmitting today.”

“Looks normal.”

“It is. Beta activity predominating. Completely normal.” Spencer expected Raj to make some wiseass comment—like how it was indistinguishable from a chimp’s, or something—but Raj’s tone was somber. “That’s what it looked like throughout most of today. What it should look like. But this is what your EEG looked like when you were in the OR.” The squiggly line degenerated into a mass of scribbles, as if it had been drawn by an angry four-year-old with a black crayon. “All interference. Gibberish.”

Spencer leaned forward. “Huh.”

“And this is what your EEG looked like when you were in the ER, visiting Rita.” The angry scribbles disappeared, and then reappeared. “Interference.”

“Holy shit. The same exact pattern.”

“Yep. And there’s more.” Another EEG pattern appeared on the screen, with black scribbles identical to the first two.

“My EEG again? With interference?”

“No. Rita’s EEG. In real time. The output transmitted from her patch at this very moment.” He paused. “It’s been that way since you put it on her.”

“It’s the same—”

“The same exact interference pattern,” Raj said quietly. “And, whatever is interfering with her EEG signal, and yours, seems to be coming from Rita. Which makes me—well, I wonder if it has something to do with those tiny particles.”

“Holy shit. Yeah.”

“And here’s another thing, Spence: whatever it is, whatever’s coming from Rita, the EEG interferes with it. Cancels it out. Kind of the way noise-canceling headphones work: waves in opposite phase knocking against each other.”