PROLOGUE

 

NORMAN KLEIN WAS DYING FROM CANCER. It had started in his liver and now spread to his pancreas. Neither radiation nor chemotherapy had been able to halt its progress. He had a week to live.

And he knew it.

In his private room, Klein looked at his reflection in the bedside mirror. Bone gaunt, hair thinned to nothing, and his jaundiced eyes were dull with hopeless resignation. All morning, he'd stared out the window at the manicured hospital grounds, wishing he could have just a little longer.

When the door opened, Klein didn't recognize the doctor. Although he'd seen so many, they all looked the same by now. He wore a white lab coat and had a stethoscope draped around his neck.

The doctor pulled up a chair close to the bed. He looked tired and overworked, but had an affable smile that put Klein at ease.

Klein looked up. The Grim Reaper?

"I'm Dr. Hench," he said. "I'd like to talk to you about your future."

Klein's hollow eyes flashed with anger. "Are you some kind of comedian? Future? Doesn't the word ‘terminal' on my chart there mean anything?"

Without answering, Hench opened the folder containing Klein's biographical information.

"I've seen the chart," Klein said. "It says I'm forty-two, married and have two kids. Twelve and thirteen. And it says my case is hopeless. I'm a cancer farm. Is there anything else you want to know? I'm sorry I'm so cynical, but there's been at least ten other doctors in here in the last twenty-four hours. Why can't I just die in peace?"

Hench put the folder on the bedside table. "I'll come right to the point, Mr. Klein. You and I both know how sick you are. It's an undisputable fact. But what would you say if I offered you a chance for a complete cure and restoration to your youthful state?"

Klein gazed back at Hench. "It sounds like you've been working too hard, doc. I'm already as good as dead."

"That depends on how you define dead. Before you say anything else, let me explain." Hench paused and took a deep breath. "I'm part of an organization that believes in the technology of the future. We believe if we can preserve you now, tomorrow's science will allow us to cure you and even restore your youth."

Klein leaned forward. "It sounds like a bunch of medical jargon to me."

"I understand your skepticism, but I assure you, it's quite possible. We've already had remarkable success."

"Well, tell me this. Why me? There are thousands of people with terminal cancer."

Hench smiled. "Two reasons. First, we only accept patients when death is immediately imminent. Second, the expense involved is beyond most people's capability. You are wealthy. Your wealth can benefit you now."

Klein nodded. "And benefit you. How much are we talking about here?"

"They will turn over your estate to the organization. Then they will provide a generous trust for your wife and children. When they resuscitate and restore you to health, whatever funds are left, they return to you. They'd no longer have to maintain you. At that point, they would terminate the contract."

"And just how am I . . . maintained?"

"Cryonic suspension in liquid nitrogen."

"Frozen, right?"

Hench leaned back. "Not in the normal sense. We like to think of it as medical time travel. When technology breaks the boundaries of disease and death, then we resuscitate you. It might be ten years. It might be a hundred. One thing is certain, though. It is your only chance to survive."

"So I'd just go to sleep, and when I wake up it might fifty years down the road, and I wouldn't even know how long I'd been asleep?"

Hench nodded. "Exactly."

Klein scrawled his signature on the contract with Hench's pen. "When will my wife hear?" He felt a wave of heartache from the past.

"As soon as we transfer you to the facility."

Hench patted Klein on the shoulder and walked out.

A few minutes later, a nurse came in and gave Klein an injection. When she left the room, his mind began to drift and he thought about his children, their accomplishments, their dreams: college, weddings, grandchildren. Now it was possible he could be there. He stared at the dark rectangle of his ceiling. He then stopped thinking about everyone else. He began to think only of himself. He didn't have to die.

He might live. He just might.

Soon, someone came with a gurney and took him away.

 

1

JOSH LOGAN TAPPED OUT A beat on his steering wheel as he drove his silver Land Rover up Interstate 100. The red boulders of the Phoenix foothills rose stark against a crisp March sky, but the peaceful setting did little to calm his excitement.

He couldn't believe it when, after a half-hour telephone interview, the man himself had offered him the job.

Lawrence Bowman's voice sounded just as Josh remembered. Cold, formal, arrogant. The best neurosurgeon in the country, however, could afford to be. As the director of the Ford Medical Institute in Scottsdale, he wielded a powerful position. And anybody lucky enough to be chosen to work with him would find himself at the forefront of medicine.

They had recently featured Ford in the New England Journal of Medicine, for their pioneering work in cryosurgery, and its use in dissecting brain tumors. Bowman and his colleagues found, when they applied a sub-zero solution to the tumor's perimeter, just prior to removal, bleeding became nonexistent. The resulting "cold spot" as they called it, prevented any cancerous cells from migrating from the site. It would save countless patients from more radical surgeries that left many with gross motor deficits or stroke.

Ford would be a great opportunity for Josh to practice his considerable skills in neurosurgery, away from small town America.

His acceptance by Bowman was a blessing in another way as well. He needed to leave the small resort town where he practiced for the last three years. With no immediate family left, there was little to keep him. Josh's wife had died two years earlier, a devastating loss whose emotional scars still raked at his heart. To make the blow doubly painful, she was three months pregnant at the time. Josh's only solace was knowing the death, with ironic compassion, had liberated his wife from a deep despair over a crippling illness.

Josh's cell phone rang, pulling him from his depressing reverie. The incoming message surprised him:

 

REPORT TO THE MEDICAL INSTITUTE ON ARRIVAL

 

That's odd!

Josh had planned on meeting Bowman at the Hilton in Scottsdale for an impromptu meeting and lunch. Now suddenly, they were telling him to go directly to Ford. He knew Bowman was busy like most facility directors. Still, he had at least expected to have a couple days to get settled. Then again, it did not surprise him, knowing what he did about the man.

With rising uncertainty, Josh drove to the Scottsdale exit, turned onto the private access road, and rolled to a stop at Ford's entryway.

While the security guard waved him through, Josh gazed out at the mammoth structure in the distance. The building's facade was a bastion of one-way glass, designed to reflect the stifling heat of the Arizona sun.

Two minutes later, Josh parked and crossed the manicured grounds to the main entrance, where a carved sandstone sign announced:

 

FORD MEDICAL INSTITUTE

 

An armed security guard flanked the revolving door and nodded as Josh passed by him. He felt an odd sensation as he pushed through the doors . . . that he had entered the realm of the future.

Massive plaques and excellence awards from every hospital organization one could name lined the walls. They had celebrated towering achievements within this building.

Josh felt the problems of the outside world fading behind him. Where life and death decisions weighed like lead, and the minds of a few decided the outcomes.

As Josh approached the receptionist, he wondered what problem caused him to be summoned here already.

"Good morning," the receptionist said as Josh approached the desk. She smiled with brilliant white teeth.

Josh returned the smile as the girl held out a clipboard for him to sign.

"If you don't mind," she said.

Josh took the clipboard and filled in his name and reason for the visit. He handed it back to her a minute later.

The receptionist's eyes lit up. "Dr. Logan, we've been expecting you. I have strict instructions to deliver you to Dr. Bowman, personally."

Josh smiled. "I didn't know I was so important."

As they made their way through the bustling wave of corridors within, the scope of their operation amazed Josh. They employed over two hundred doctors and twice as many ancillary personnel.

In total secrecy, The Ford Institute built and maintained an astonishing array of cutting-edge medical technologies: a new laser neurosurgery lab; video transmission surgery; a nanotechnology lab; even a virtual reality surgery center, known as Surgery Wizard, where doctors could feel what it was like to actually open a body without ever stepping foot in the operating room.

Ford not only helped save lives, but also provided an endless stream of medical data, stored and ready to use at the touch of a computer key, by any medical facility in the world.

Josh would now be working with the best and brightest in his field. Best of all, he would be working side by side with his idol, Lawrence Bowman.

Josh had proved himself a competent brain surgeon at the small hospital he had worked at in Maryland. And when he read an opening was available at Ford, he wrote a ten-page letter to Bowman, outlining why he was the best man for the job.

Although it would require long hours, the position represented an honor badge for Josh, who had lingered in the shadows behind older but less competent neurosurgeons at his previous hospital. He had no intention of becoming beholden to a bunch of old bureaucrats who weren't on the cutting edge of medicine. Ford would offer Josh all the things he craved. Respect, autonomy and, more importantly, to work in a state-of-the-art facility that offered him a real chance to save the most serious cases. The receptionist stopped beside a huge mahogany door. "Okay, right in there. He's waiting on you. Good luck."