Plague (12 page)

There was a Workforce Services suite and he walked toward it until he heard the elevator doors close
behind him
and then he spun and ran over to the stairs leading down. He took two at a time before he stood in front of the door leading into the third floor and
then
took a deep breath
to
compose himself.

He opened the doors and stepped through.

The third floor was better taken care of than the fourth. The carpets didn’t have any stains and the walls were free of clutter. He walked past a set of double doors that had a black sign emblazoned on the glass that took up half the door: MEDICAL RECORDS.

Ben checked the watch on his phone. It was 11:51 a
.
m. He had four minutes.

He walked down the hallway to a drinking fountain and took a sip of water but his throat was nearly closed up from the amount of adrenaline coursing through him. Th
ere were restrooms just around the
corner and down a small corridor and he walked to them and went into a stall
. He
sat on the toilet seat.

Occasionally, not often, but occasionally,
it hit
him
just what an awkward turn his life had taken. He had graduated first in his class from Berkley’s Haas School of Business with his MBA when he was just twenty-one and the world had been his oyster. He’d been offered a consulting job in Manhattan making a hundred and sixty thousand a year and had accepted.

But that felt like a different life now. That was before his son Matthew had developed autism. Before the twenty-four
-
hour care and the crying and the strained marriage. Before it felt like his soul had been ripped out of his body and crushed. He had to leave the position in Manhattan and he and his wife and Matthew moved back to Northern California. He accepted a job at a non-profit as assistant director
,
making a quarter of his previous salary. But the job had flexibility so that he could spend more time with Matthew.

He checked his watch: 11:54 a
.
m. He had one minute.

Ben stood up and walked out into the corridor. He had never done anything like this before. He was not a criminal. The last time he had gotten in trouble that he could remember was when he received a speeding ticket rush
ing his wife to the hospital when she
was in labor.

He took a deep breath, and continued down the corridor to the medical records room.

Ben opened the door, expecting to see a receptionist. He fiddled with the credentials in his pocket that had been forged by a counterfeiter that made fake identifications for illegal aliens
and then withdrew his hand. Instead of a receptionist or a security guard or a police officer, there was a sign, handwritten with marker on a piece of paper
,
that had been pinned up on a small board
:
PLEASE DIAL 9 FOR OPERATOR IF YOU NEED HELP.

He smiled to himself. You had to love the way government operated.

Ben walked around the counter and past the large stacks of periodicals and folders and papers. What he was looking for wouldn’t be here. There was an adjoining room and he opened the door onto a world he couldn’t begin to fathom.

M
anila folders
were
stacked o
n shelves from floor to ceiling. The Department of Health was slowly going digital, but they could
not
destroy the paper copies until the subjects passed away or moved out of state. The rows of shelves seemed
to go on forever like an infinite
library of people’s personal information. He didn’t want to spend the time running through here and he scanned the room
for something that
…
there it was. In the corner was a computer with a barstool in front of it.

He went to it and sat down, typing in several names. He wrote the call numbers on his palm with a pen that was
on the counter
next to the computer
and the writing got past his wrist before he was done.

Ben jumped to his feet, and began running down the rows of shelves. They were arranged by number
,
rather than alphabetically
,
and it took a few minutes for him to adjust. But once he did
,
it was just like
scanning
through the Dewey decimal system at any library. He found the first two files he needed but the third wasn’t where it was supposed to be. He read the name again: it was a female. He wondered
whether
it was under her maiden name and went back to the computer and found a number for her maiden name and got the file.

He nabbed seven
more files and was about to head back to the computer and run the remainder of his names when he heard voices in the room next door.
The door opened.

Ben jumped behind one of the shelves, kneeling down with the files in his arms.
T
wo people, a male and a female, were discussing a retirement party that had been thrown for someone at the office. They stopped near the shelves, about ten feet from where Ben was. His heart was pounding so
hard it was causing him to be breathless
. Sweat was beginning to trickle down his neck and back and it tickled his skin.

Slowly, he began to crawl away from them. He got another twenty or thirty feet before he heard them say goodbye. The male continued down toward him and the female went back to the main office.

Ben was frozen as he heard the footsteps approach him. The man was in another row, just to the right, but he was bound to see him when he walked by. Ben thought about dumping the files and acting as if he had just mistakenly walked into the wrong office. But that couldn’t happen. These files were valuable and they wouldn’t get another chance: the office of medical records was moving to a secure location a hundred and eighty miles away. If he wanted the files, this was his only shot.

He stood to his feet. There were over four hundred employees in this building alone. What were the chances that th
is guy had met every single one?

Ben turned the corner and began walking toward the man.

The man was tall and black with a
potbelly
. He wore a short-sleeve shirt and
a
tie and he eyed Ben but didn’t say anything.

Ben smiled and said hello as he walked past him. Relief washed over him
;
his heart felt like it
had fallen
into his stomach and his knees were weak.

“Excuse me,” the man said from behind him, “can I help you with something?”

Ben looked to him. “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Oh, I’m Timothy. From Dr. Wharton’s office upstairs. Cami called about these records yesterday and no one was here when I came down.”

“What records are those?”

“For the smoking study that Dr. Wharton’s doing. They told me everything’s cleared up.”

“No one ran it past me, but I wasn’t here yesterday.”

“Well I’ll wait if you like and you can call up there and verify.”

The man looked him up and down, running his eyes over the names on the files he was holding. “Nah, just make sure you sign out for ‘em at the front desk.”

“Thanks.”

Ben walked out the door to the reception area where the woman was sitting. He smiled as he signed a
fake name to a
sheet that was sitting on
the counter
and then went out the front door, h
aving to lean against the wall a moment because he felt like he was about to faint.

CHAPTER 15

The Center for Anti-Vaccination Studies was a
five-
room suite in an office building occupied by middle-income lawyers and dentists. The first floor always smelled like popcorn and massage oil from a parlor that took up the first suite. They claimed to be licensed massage therapists, but Ben had never seen one degree
or certificate
on the wall. Plus, the men coming out of there seemed just a bit too happy.

He walked past it now and smiled to the receptionist at the front desk, a stack of files under his arm as he hit the up button on the elevator.

The fifth and top floor was much like the first except that it smelled a bit better. The CAVS
’s
five rooms were better decorated than most, with glass walls on the interior and exposed brick
in the offices
. The floor was a slick hardwood donated to CAVS from a contractor whose daughter had developed autism after a routine vaccination at the age of two.

Ben went through the office space, wondering where every
body was until he checked his p
hone: it was five in the afternoon on a Friday. He went straight to his office and shut the door. He placed the files down on his desk and sat in front of them a long time, just staring. There was a knock.

“Come in.”

Tate Buhler walked in
,
sipping a Mountain Dew Code Red. He saw the files on the desk and nearly spit up his drink. He shut the door
.
“You got them?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Tate sat down across from him at the desk and they both stared at the files. There were fifteen total. Fifteen medical records of research physicians that specialized in vaccinations.
O
ne of these physicians had recanted everything they had ever written about the safety of vaccination after one of their children developed a severe learning disability days after the MMR vaccine.

“You think it’s real?” Tate said. “I mean, I know the government does some crazy shit, but firing a doctor and then suing to keep
him
quiet just
‘
cause he’s against vaccinations sounds extreme.”

Ben smirked. “Do you remember the serial killer from the eighties who supposedly poisoned bottles of Tylenol and half a dozen people died?”

“Yeah, that was in Chicago or somewhere.”

“Well one of the people that died bought their Tylenol from a pharmacy.
The public doesn’t have access to medications in a pharmacy. That means the Tylenol
was tainted when it left the factory and so Johnson & Johnson and the
dim-witted law enforcement who investigated the case came up with this serial killer story. They dodged lawsuits, criminal liability, any repercussions at all just because money can buy you whatever you want. If they can cover up the murders of innocent people, they
can
certainly cover up firing one person.”

Tate shook his head. “What’re we even gonna do when we find this doctor? I mean he can’t talk about it, right? What good is he gonna be?”

Ben’s phone
began to ring. He picked it up.
“He’s a symbol, Tate. He’s a symbol of what we’re trying to do here. He doesn’t need to open his mouth at all. If he sits next to me on a stage with a name tag
,
that’s enough. People will Goo
gle him and find out the rest
…
Hello, this is Benjamin Cornell
…
yes
…
where?
…
when?
…
who else knows about this
…
okay
…
okay.”

Ben hung up th
e phone and sat quietly a few moments,
staring at the desk.

“You okay?”

“I’m going to be gone for a while
,” he said, standing up and heading out the door.

“How long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well where you going?” Tate yelled as Ben headed toward the elevators.

“Hawaii.”

CHAPTER 16

Ele Henano
sat in the back of Queen’s Medical Center with Tiffany Leath and
smoked
pot
from a joint. The weed was freshly picked from
his grandmother’s backyard and it had a purple tinge that you could see in the fading sunlight.

They smoked
half the joint
and then leaned back on the old lawn chairs they
’d taken out of a patio storage closet
. He’d found that if he smoked more than
half a joint
with another person, people could usually tell something was wrong. He’d been fired from one job previously because his boss, the head nurse, could instantly tell he was high. The smell, the red eyes, the greenish tongue, he could hide all of those. But he couldn’t
hide
his
goofy
personality or the giggles that pot gave him.