Several golfers just coming in saw him and stepped away. He could see one of them speak to Levigne, and gesture toward him. What did he expect, looking like he did? Glassy-eyed, barely able to stand, wearing torn, soggy clothes that stunk of the river, he looked like a derelict from hell.

But he couldn't worry about them. Couldn't think about them.

He looked back to the telephone. It was less than ten paces from where he stood but it might as well have been in California. Picking up the tree-branch cane that had brought him this far, he set it in front of him, putting his weight on it and moved forward. Right hand places the cane, right foot follows. Bring the left foot up. Right hand, right foot. Bring the left foot alongside. Stop. Deep breath.

The phone is a little closer now.

Ready? Again. Right hand, right foot. Left foot up. Though his focus was entirely on his movement and the goal toward which he was going, Osborn was acutely aware of people in the room watching him. Their faces blurred.

Then he heard a voice. His voice! It was talking to him. Clearly and succinctly.

"The bullet is lodged somewhere in the hamstring muscle. Not sure just where. But it has to come out."

Right hand, right foot. Left foot up. Right hand, right foot.

"Make a vertical incision along the middle of the back of the thigh from the lower fold of the nates." Suddenly he was back in medical school quoting from Gray's Anatomy. Gray's Anatomy. How could he remember it verbatim? How could he remember it verbatim?

Right hand, right foot. Left foot. Stop and rest. Across the room, faces still watching. Right hand, right foot. Left foot up.

The telephone is right in front of you.

Exhausted, Osborn slowly reached for the receiver and took it off the hook.

"Paul, there is a bullet lodged in your hamstring muscle. It has to come out, now."

"I know know dammit. I dammit. I know. know. Take it out!" Take it out!"

"It is is out. Just lie still." out. Just lie still."

"Do you know who I am?"

"Of course."

"What day is it?"

"I-" Osborn hesitated. "Saturday."

"You missed your plane." Vera pulled off her surgical gloves, then turned and walked out of the room.

Osborn relaxed and looked around. He was in her apartment and naked, lying facedown on the bed in her guest room. A moment later she came back. A hypodermic syringe was in her hand.

"What's that?" he asked.

"I might tell you it's succinylcholine," she said, sarcastically. "But that wouldn't be true." Walking behind him, she wiped a spot on his upper buttock with a piece of alcohol-soaked cotton, then slid the needle in and gave him the shot.

"It's an antibiotic. You probably ought to have a tetanus shot, too. God knows what was in that river besides Henri Kanarack."

"How do you know about that?" Suddenly everything that had happened flashed across his mind.

Vera reached down and gently pulled a blanket Up over him. All the way up over his shoulders so that he was warm. Then she went over and sat down on the ottoman of a leather reading chair across from him.

"You passed out in the clubhouse of a golf course about forty kilometers from here. You came back long enough to give them my number. I borrowed a friend's car. The people at the golf course were very nice. They helped me get you in the car. All I had were a few tranquilizers. I gave you all of them."

"All?"

Vera smiled. "You talk a lot when you're fucked up. Mostly about men. Henri Kanarack. Jean Packard. Your father."

In the distance they heard the singsong siren of an emergency vehicle and her smile faded.

"I've been to the police," she said, "The police?"

"Last night. I was worried. They searched your hotel room and found the succinylcholine. They don't know what it is or what it was for."

"But you do-"

"Now I do, yes."

"I couldn't very well tell you, could I?"

Osborn's eyes were heavy, and he was beginning to drift off. "The police?" he said, weakly.

Getting up, Vera crossed the room and turned on a small lamp in the corner, then shut off the overhead light. "They don't know you're here. At least I don't think they do. When they find Kanarack's body and his car with your fingerprints in it they'll come here asking if I've seen you or heard from you."

"What are you going to tell them?"

Vera could see him trying to put everything together, trying to tell if he'd made a mistake calling her, if he could really trust her. But he was too weary. The lids came down over his eyes and he sank slowly back into the pillow.

Bending down, she brushed her lips over his forehead. "Nobody will know. I promise," she whispered.

Osborn didn't hear her. He was falling, tumbling. He was not whole. The truth had never been as stark or as fearfully ugly. He had made himself a doctor because he had wanted to take away hurt and pain, all the while knowing he could never take away his own. What people saw was the image of a doctor. To them, helpful and caring. They never saw the rest of his personality because it didn't exist. There was nothing there and never would be until the demons inside him were dead. What Henri Kanarack knew could have killed them, but it was not to be. Finding him had been a tease that made it worse than before. Suddenly his falling stopped and he opened his eyes. It was autumn in New Hampshire and he was in the woods with his father. They were laughing and skipping stones across a pond. The sky was blue, the leaves were bright and the air was crisp.

He was eight years old.

42.

"OY, MCVEY!" Benny Grossman said, then as quickly asked if he could call him right back and hung up. It was Saturday morning in New York, midafternoon in London.

McVey, back in the pocket-size room in the hotel on Half Moon Street Interpol had so generously provided for him, swirled two fingers of Famous Grouse in a glass with no ice-because the hotel had none-and waited for Benny to call back.

He'd spent the morning in the company of Ian Noble, the young Home Office pathologist, Dr. Michaels, and Dr. Stephen Richman, the specialist in micropathology who'd discovered the extreme cold to which the severed head of their John Doe had been subjected.

After careful inventory taken at behest of Scotland Yard, neither of the two cryonic suspension companies licensed in Great Britain, Cryonetic Sepulture of Edinburgh or Cryo-Mastaba of Camberwell, London, reported a head-or entire body, for that matter-of a stored "guest" missing. So, unless someone was running an unlicensed cryonic suspension company or had a portable cryocapsule he was hauling around London with bodies or pieces of bodies frozen to more than minus four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, they had to rule out the possibility that Mr. John Doe's head had been voluntarily frozen.

By the time McVey, Noble, and Dr. Michaels had had breakfast and arrived at Richman's office/laboratory on Gower Mews, Richman had already examined the body of John Cordell, the headless corpse found in a small apartment across the playing field from Salisbury Cathedral. X rays of Cordell's body revealed two screws securing a hairline crack in his lower pelvis. Screws that probably would have been removed once the fissure had properly healed had the subject lived that long.

Metallurgical tests Richman had had done on the screws revealed microscopic cobweb-like fractures throughout, proving conclusively that Cordell's body had undergone the same extreme freezing-to temperatures nearing absolute zero-as had John Doe's head.

"Why?" McVey asked.

"That's certainly part of the question, isn't it?" Dr. Richman replied as he opened the door from the cramped laboratory where they had gathered to view the comparative slides of the failed screws taken from Cordell's body and the failed metal that had been the plate in John Doe's head, and led them down a narrow, yellow-green hallway toward his office.

Stephen Richman was in his early sixties, stout but fit with the kind of solidity that comes from hard physical labor in youth. "You'll excuse the mess," he said, opening the door to his office. "I wasn't prepared for a poker crowd."

His working area was little more than a closet, half the size of McVey's minuscule hotel room. Heaped helter-skelter among books, journals, correspondence, cardboard boxes and stacks of technical videos were dozens of vessels containing preserved organs from God knew how many species, some three or four to the jar. Somewhere among the clutter was a window and Richman's desk and his desk chair. Two other chairs were piled high with books and file folders, which he immediately cleared off for his visitors. McVey volunteered to stand, but Richman wouldn't hear of it and disappeared in search of a third chair. An exasperating fifteen minutes later, he reappeared, lugging a secretary's chair with one caster missing, which he'd located in a basement storeroom.

"The question, Detective McVey," Richman said as they all finally sat down, picking up McVey's query asked nearly a half hour earlier as if he'd just now posed it-"is not so much 'why?' but 'how?'"

"What do you mean?" McVey said.

"He means we're talking about human tissues," Michaels said, flatly. "Experiments with temperatures approaching absolute zero have been conducted primarily with salts and some metals, like copper." Abruptly, Michaels realized he was overstepping courtesy. "Excuse me, Doctor Richman," he said apologetically. "I didn't mean to-"

"It's quite all right, Doctor." Richman smiled, then looked to McVey and Commander Noble. "What you have to realize is this all gets very muddied in scientific mumbo-jumbo. But the nut of it is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which basically says science can never reach absolute zero because, among other things, it would then mean a state of perfect orderliness. Atomic orderliness."

Noble's face was blank. So was McVey's.

"Every atom consists of electrons orbiting around a nucleus, which is made of protons and neutrons. What happens as substances get colder is that the normal movement of these atoms and their parts becomes reduced, slowed, if you will. The colder the temperature, the slower their movements.

"Now, if we took an external magnet and focused it critically on these slowly moving atoms, we would create a magnetic field where we could manipulate the atoms and their parts, and make them do pretty much what we wanted. Theoretically if we could reach absolute zero, absolute zero, we could do more than pretty much, we could do we could do more than pretty much, we could do exactly exactly as we wanted because all activity would be stopped." as we wanted because all activity would be stopped."

"That only gets us back to McVey's question," Noble said. "Why? Why freeze decapitated bodies and a head to that degree, assuming you could get them to absolute zero?"

"To join them," Richman said, wholly without emotion.

"Join them?" Noble was incredulous.

"It's the only reason I could begin to give."

Tugging at an ear, McVey turned away and looked out the window. Outside, the morning was bright and sunny. By contrast, Richman's office felt like the inside of a musty box. Swiveling back, McVey found himself nose to nose with the labeled brain of a Maltese cat suspended in some kind of liquid preservative inside a bell jar. He looked at Richman. "You're talking about atomic surgery, correct?"

Richman smiled. "Of sorts. Simply put, at absolute zero, under the application of a strong magnetic field all the atomic particles would be perfectly lined up, and under total control. If we could do that, we could perform atomic cryosurgery. Microsurgery beyond conception."

"Elaborate a little, if you would, please," Noble said.

Richman's eyes brightened and McVey could almost feel his pulse quicken. The whole idea of what he was discussing excited him tremendously. "What it means, Commander, assuming we could freeze people to that degree, operate on them and then thaw them out with no damage to the tissues, is that atoms could be connected. A chemical bond would be formed between them so that a given electron is shared between two different atoms. It would make a seamless connection. The perfect seam, perfect seam, if you will. It would be as if it had been created by nature. Like a tree that grew that way." if you will. It would be as if it had been created by nature. Like a tree that grew that way."

"Is somebody trying to do that?" McVey asked quietly.

"It's not possible," Michaels interjected.

McVey looked at him. "Why?"

"Because of the Heisenberg Principle. If I may, Doctor Richman." Richman nodded at the young pathologist, and Michaels turned to McVey. For some reason he needed the American to know that he knew his business, that he knew what he was talking about. It was important for what they were doing. And beyond that, it was his way of showing and, at the same time, demanding respect.

"It's a principle of quantum mechanics that says it's impossible to measure two properties of a quantum object-say an atom or a molecule-at the same time with infinite precision. You can do one or the other but not both. You might tell an atom's speed and direction but you could not, at the same time, say precisely where it was."

"Could you do it at absolute zero?" McVey was giving him his due.

"Of course. Because at absolute zero everything would be stopped."

"Detective McVey," Richman interjected. "It is possible to get temperatures to less than one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero. It has been done. The concept of absolute zero is just that, a concept. It cannot be reached. It's impossible."

"My question, Doctor, was not if it can or it can't. I asked if someone was trying to do it." There was a decided edge to McVey's voice. He'd had enough of theory and now wanted fact. And he was staring at Richman, waiting for an answer.

This was a side of the L.A. detective Noble had never seen and made him realize why McVey had the reputation he did.

"Detective McVey, so far we've shown that the freezing was done to one body and one head. X rays have shown metal in only two of the remaining six cadavers. When we have that metal analyzed, we might be able to arrive at a more conclusive judgment."

"What's your gut tell you, Doctor?"

"My gut is strictly off the record. Accepting such, I'd venture that what you have are failed attempts at a very sophisticated type of cryosurgery."

"The head of one person fused to the body of another."

Richman nodded.

Noble looked at McVey. "Someone is trying to make a modern-day Frankenstein?"

"Frankenstein was created from the bodies of the dead," Michaels said.

"Good Lord!" Noble said, standing and nearly knocking over a vessel containing the enlarged heart of a professional soccer player. Steadying the jar, he looked from Michaels to Richman. "These people were frozen alive?"

"It would appear so."

"Then why the evidence of cyanide poisoning in all the victims?" McVey asked.

Richman shrugged. "Partial poisoning? A part of the procedure? Who knows?"

Noble looked at McVey, then stood. "Thank you very much, Doctor Richman. We won't take more of your time."

"Just a second, Ian." McVey turned to Richman. "One other question, Doctor. The head of our John Doe was thawing from the deep freeze when it was discovered. Would it make any difference when when it was frozen as to its appearance and pathological makeup when it thawed?" it was frozen as to its appearance and pathological makeup when it thawed?"

"I'm not sure I follow you," Richman said.

McVey leaned forward. "We've had trouble learning John Doe's identity. Can't find out who he is. Suppose we've been looking in the wrong place, trying to find a man who's been missing for the last few days or weeks. What if it had been months, or even years? Would that be possible?"

"It's a hypothetical question-but I would have to say that if someone had had found a means of freezing to absolute zero, then nothing molecular would have been disturbed. So when it thawed there would be no way to tell if the freezing had been done a week ago or hundred years ago or thousand, for that matter." found a means of freezing to absolute zero, then nothing molecular would have been disturbed. So when it thawed there would be no way to tell if the freezing had been done a week ago or hundred years ago or thousand, for that matter."

McVey looked to Noble. "I think maybe your missing-persons detectives better go back to work."