"Ken, could you and Jake please come in. We have the problem I was afraid we had." He flipped the phone shut and turned back to Stone. "Karl entered Ms. Hampton and her mother into the clinical trials at the last minute, as a special favor. She's in no danger." Now Stone saw two men come through the front door. One was the tall Japanese man who had slugged him the day before. Shit. I need this? Is he going to work me over again? The other guy was dressed in white, as though he were an orderly or nurse. Stone noticed he had a plastic syringe in his right hand. "Ken, could you and Jake please take care of this. He'll be going with us." Stone examined the three of them. Well, he thought, / guess I'm going to be back inside the Dorian Institute after all. "Look, there's no need for excessive violence here. We could just set some ground rules for this situation." The Japanese man named Ken walked over and seized him around the neck, while at the same time pulling his right arm around behind him, a decisive hammerlock. "You fucker," Stone choked out. "Let--" The man Bartlett had called Jake, the one in white, shoved a needle into his arm. "This could be the experience you've been looking for," Bartlett said. "You've been pursuing me like a dog chasing a car. Now we're about to see if you're man enough to handle the consequences when you've caught it." You're damned right I'll handle it, he tried to say. But he wasn't sure if he actually got it said, the void was closing in so fast. Chapter 29 _Thursday, April 9 10:33 P.M. _ "Grant, is that you?" Ally squinted in the semi-dark of the room, finally making out the silhouette. He was sitting in a chair beside her bed, and his face was troubled, reminding her of when he'd had a bad day in high school. Am I dreaming again? she puzzled. The clock on the wall told her that this was a late hour for whatever he was up to now. "It's me," he said, his voice low, just above a whisper. The door behind him, she noticed, was shut. "Welcome back to the world. They moved you upstairs just for tonight. This is the first chance I've had to get near you." She was still wondering where she was, what day it was. The walls were an icy blue, illuminated only by the silver- and-green glow of the bank of CRT screens that now monitored her heart and her respiration. She lifted her head off the pillow and for a moment, looked past Grant, examining the screen of the heart monitor. It was a phonocardiogram. She knew what to look for. Over the years she'd learned to interpret every irregular pulse, every errant amplitude, but now the sonic abnormalities that typically characterized her stenosis, the struggle of her heart's scarred valve to maintain adequate coronary output, were significantly damped.