“At a lower price than the original flashback,” Sato said proudly. “F-two will be street priced at a new dollar for forty or fifty hours. Even the homeless will be able to afford it.”
“You can’t give three hundred and forty–some million people each a fish tank to float in,” snarled Nick. “And who’s going to feed the flashing millions? It’s hard enough to do that now.”
“Of course there will be no tanks, Bottom-san. The customer will have to find his or her own flashcave or comfortable, private place in which to go under Flash-two. The tank really is the best option. We imagine that providing such places—perhaps some not so different than NCAR—will be a growth industry in the next few years. We imagine that other nations, ones that do not allow either form of flashback within their own borders, might be helpful in manufacturing such total-immersion tanks for Americans.”
Nick counted cartridges. He had fifteen rounds in the magazine already in the Glock and one more magazine in his jacket pocket. Thirty rounds total. It might take several 9mm rounds to crack one of these tanks, if they were breakable by small-arms fire. The .32 didn’t count since it almost certainly couldn’t smash this type of super-Plexiglas. It might be transparent Kevlar-3, in which case even the Glock would be useless here. He later realized that this probability was the only thing that stopped him.
The two men stood in green-shadowed silence for a long moment: Hideki Sato contemplative, Nick Bottom seething in murderous frustration.
“Why are you showing me this?” asked Nick, staring Sato in the face.
The big security chief smiled slightly. “We have to leave now, Bottom-san, if I am to return you to your vehicle before the hour is up as I promised. Later today, when you speak to Mr. Nakamura, do not forget the possibility of NCAR.”
“I’ll never forget NCAR,” said Nick.
1.17
Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25
“Where are they?”
Nick was in the weapons-check airlock and Gunny G. was the only one behind the counter.
“Your son’s gone, Mr. B. And your father-in-law has had some sort of stroke or heart attack,” said the ex-Marine.
“Gone?” shouted Nick. “What do you mean Val’s gone? Where to?”
“We don’t know, Mr. B. He went up and out the skylight and down a rope. I’ll show you.”
“Is Leonard—my father-in-law—alive?”
“Yeah. I brought him to Dr. Tak.”
“Let me in, Gunny. Buzz the door open.”
“I can’t, Mr. B. Not ’til you surrender the two guns you checked out this morning. You know the rules.”
“I know the rules,” said Nick. He came back to the counter and slipped a $50 old-bucks bill across. He was nearing the last of his “advance” from Nakamura.
Gunny G. buzzed the heavy door open.
Dr. Tak’s real name was Sudaret Jatisripitak but everyone in the mall called him Dr. Tak. He’d fled from Thailand during their last “Thai Rak Thai—Thais Love Thais” revolution that had killed a fifth of the nation’s population and found that he could make a decent living, without ever being medically certified in the United States, simply by giving black-market medical care to the few thousand residents of the Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums. Accordingly, Dr. Tak’s cubie was one of the largest in the mall, half of the upstairs part of the former Macy’s department store, and Nick found Leonard asleep in one of the ER cubicles near the entrance to Dr. Tak’s lair.
Nick’s heart leaped in terror when he saw the IV drip and other tubes going into his father-in-law. No, he wouldn’t be forgetting NCAR any time soon.
Tak, a small man in his seventies but still with short jet-black hair, came into the cubicle, shook hands with Nick, and said, “He will live. Mr. Gunny G. found your father-in-law unconscious in your cubie and I directed he be brought here. I’ve done various diagnostic tests. Professor Fox regained consciousness briefly but he is currently sleeping.”
“What’s wrong with him?” asked Nick. Leonard looked much older to him than the old professor had five years earlier when he’d dropped Val off in L.A. in his care.
“I believe it was an attack of angina brought on by aortic stenosis,” said the old Thai doctor. “The syncopic episode was a result of the pain and lack of oxygen to the heart.”
“What does ‘syncopic episode’ mean, Doc?”
“Fainting. His loss of consciousness.”
“I think I know what angina is, but what’s the… aortic stenosis?”
“Correct, Mr. Bottom. Aortic stenosis is an abnormal narrowing of the aortic valve. At certain times—say, times of great exertion or tension—this narrowing can shut off blood from the left ventricle of the heart. His symptoms were the sudden onset of angina and the fainting.”
“Is it fixable?” Nick asked softly, staring at the sleeping old man’s face. Dara had loved her father. “Will he survive it?”
“Two quite different questions,” said Dr. Tak with a smile. “About four percent of the time, the initial symptom of aortic stenosis is sudden death. Your father-in-law was lucky that his symptoms were limited to angina and loss of consciousness. From my initial tests—and I have good diagnostic equipment here, Mr. Bottom—my first guess is that this was a form of the heart problem called senile calcific aortic stenosis…”
“Senile!” said Nick, shocked.
“Used only in the sense that it occurs naturally in people over sixty-five years of age,” said Dr. Tak. “As one ages, protein collagen of the valve leaflets is destroyed and calcium is deposited on the leaflets. Turbulence then increases, causing thickening and stenosis of the valve, even while mobility is reduced by calcification. Why this progresses to the point of causing aortic stenosis in some patients but not in others is not known. It has in Professor Fox’s case.”
“What about fixing it?” said Nick.
Dr. Tak turned away from his patient and spoke very softly. “Once the symptoms of shortage of breath, angina, or fainting occur, there’s little that can be done for a patient of Dr. Fox’s age short of the surgical procedure called aortic valve replacement.”
“Is that expensive?” asked Nick. “Can he get it on government coverage?”
Dr. Tak smiled grimly. “I am not a surgeon. Since the health care meltdown in your country, Mr. Bottom, the waiting time for the National Health Service Initiative–covered aortic valve replacement is a little over two years. Bioprosthetic valves taken from horses or cows are used in the procedure and that harvesting itself takes a long time and must be prioritized for patients. Also, all surgical recipients of mechanical prosthetic valves require immune-system drugs, including lifelong anticoagulation treatment with blood thinners such as warfarin—also known as Coumadin—to prevent clot formation on the valve surfaces. This is a very expensive drug and not covered under Medicare Two.”
“And, don’t tell me, let me guess,” grated Nick through his teeth, “most people suffering this… aortic stenosis… don’t live long enough to get to the government-subsidized surgery. And if they do, they can’t afford the blood thinner they’ll need.”
“That is correct,” said Dr. Tak. “Years ago, when I was a young physician in Bangkok, we all expected breakthroughs in genetic research to produce cloned human heart valves which would make such valve transplants not require immune-system and anticoagulant medications—since even the rare transplant of valves from human cadavers in this procedure had avoided the autoimmune problems—but, of course, with the crash of the great pharmaceutical companies in North America after your so-called health care reform, and in the absence of government-funded research in America and the post–EU countries, those hopes have disappeared.”