being away from her. “Your place or mine?” she asked as she twirled her finger around a strand of her hair; not that he could see the action but more that it put her in character.
Tanaka paused on the other end of the line momentarily, then answered curtly.
“I’ll come to you.”
~
Putting on her most professional face as she went back to the far end of the long building, Dr. Warren walked out to the secretary who politely informed her that her client was in examination room one waiting for her.
She knocked once on the door, allowing a second for the occupant to yell if they weren’t decent, then twisted the handle and walked in.
“Good morning, my name is Dr. Warren, and you are Mr. … Evans?” she said as she scanned the paper on her clipboard.
“That’s right, Mike Evans,” said the man sat on the couch wearing a hospital gown.
She looked up to smile briefly at him in reassurance. “And you’re here for your pre-workup before cryostasis?” she asked, knowing what the answer was but gauging the man’s resolve by the way he delivered his response.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with more eagerness than before.
“Excellent,” she responded, as she began to work her fingers down his spine one vertebrae at a time. The man had already undergone a full-body MRI as well as a total screening of his bloodwork. He was in good health, with some old injuries but nothing in her opinion that would remove him from suitability by any stretch. Her main focus was on his respiratory system as the man’s notes showed that he had recently quit smoking.
“Tell me about your smoking habits, before you quit,” she asked as she placed a stethoscope on his back. “Deep breaths, please,” she instructed
“Started as a kid,” he said in between exaggerated lungfuls of air going in and out of his body, “stopped almost a year ago now. Hit me hard when I first quit though, had a real bad chest for weeks.”
“That happens, what is it you do?” Warren said quietly as her focus was on the slight rattle she heard in his right lung, gone as soon as she detected it.
“I’m an engineer,” he said.
Frowning, she shook the mouse of the computer across the pad to wake up the screen, then clicked on the flies marked as Evans’ chest X-rays. Running her trained eye over every line for abnormalities, her distracted mind wandered back to Dr. Robert Milstone. Robert was a friend and a fertility expert. She had readily agreed to be part of the plan when offered. She suspected that they were intentionally recruiting the people with the least amount of living family, which was certainly true in her case, but Robert had stayed in Manhattan and taken a job at Lenox Hill Hospital so that he could live in the same neighborhood as his elderly mother.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that he had declined their offer, which she thought would be a risky move, but she worried that he had been taken against his will, or worse, killed to protect their secrets.
Fixing her glazed eyes back on the screen, she saw no obvious reason to be concerned or anything to support the slight rattle she thought she had detected. Switching screens, she added her full endorsement to the file marked EVANS, Michael J.
“Okay, Mr. Evans,” she said as she turned around with her official smile once more, “next stop for you is the freezer!”
Before travelling to NYC, Mike Evans had quietly put his affairs in order and used the official cover story that he was leaving his current employment to work on developing offshore oil platforms.
~
A half day ahead of him, and travelling in far less style, Robert Milstone regained consciousness in the back of a moving vehicle. His hands were bound with flexi-cuffs, as were his ankles with larger versions, and as his vision swam lazily back into focus he fixed his eyes on an Asian man wearing suit pants and a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The tie was loosened and the collar unfastened, but the eyes were what struck him. They kept his attention zeroed on the man’s face, scared to look away. He opened his mouth to speak, but thick dribble just rolled off his tongue. The metallic taste in his mouth was sickening, making him retch and hack instead of speaking.
“Yeah, that won’t go away any time soon, buddy,” said the man watching over him as he leaned back to stretch his cramped