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how difficult it would be for his mother to feed herself or even to drink. Several days ago, she had had a bad choking episode that led to pneumonia. Would that have happened in the nursing home? Harry felt responsible. Sure, he pulled strings to make sure she got a private room and the best doctors in the city, but that didn’t erase the fact that for the sake of pride and honor he had played roulette with his mother’s life.
    “Can you hold for a minute, Mr. Lewton? I think I see Dr. Weiss coming down the hall.”
    “Sure, sure.”
    Harry glanced at the TV. Christ, look at those peepers! The shy, sphinxlike woman on the monitor kept looking off into space as she spoke. But now and then, quite abruptly, she would turn and stare straight into the camera, opening her green eyes wide under the canopy of her dark, gull-wing eyebrows. When she did that, she seemed to reach out from the TV screen and look directly at Harry himself.
    Harry was intrigued by her, by her bashfulness, which struck him as a paradox that needed explanation. She paws the ground like a scared kitten. But she’s a panther, no kitten. If she wanted to, she could eat you for breakfast. You or any man. Just look at those eyes.
    From time to time, Harry glanced at the other monitors—closed surveillance circuits that gave him a godlike view of what was going on anywhere in the hospital. The pièce de résistance was a sixty-inch LCD screen on the wall to his left, which displayed a schematic of glowing lights showing the status of every door, elevator, and fire alarm within the 1.2 million square feet of the medical center. The lights were all green now, not a yellow or red among them. The medical center was functioning as it ought to, like a healthy, vigorous body.
    The only irritant to the healthy body was on the plaza outside the main entrance. The cameras showed a couple dozen protesters circling there, as they chanted and waved signs, all neatly printed in the same blue paint: STOP DR. FRANKENSTEIN ; , NO AMALGAMATION OF MAN AND MACHINE ; HONOR THE HUMAN SOUL ; WHERE WILL IT END? ; FLETCHER MEMORIAL PLAYS GOD.
    TV cameras always brought out groups like this. But this bunch wasn’t doing any harm. They were staying out of the flowerbeds and they weren’t blocking the traffic circle. Not like those Green fanatics who tried to shut down the oil terminals back when he was an assistant security director in Texas City. That had been his first job after leaving police work, and he had handled it well. He had gone strictly by the book, which was easy enough when you’ve just finished your MBA in security management. No one got hurt, nothing got blown up, and—bottom line—the tankers came in on time. If only everything else in his life had turned out as smoothly as that. It almost made up for that fiasco at Nacogdoches.
    Back on the center screen, Dr. Ali O’Day was trying to explain what a neural net was, and, judging by the puzzled look on Kathleen Brown’s face, it was an uphill climb. Ali looked different than she had the few times Harry had seen her in person, in the hallways or in the staff dining room. It’s that surgical cap she’s wearing , he decided. It swept her wavy, shoulder-length sable hair out of sight, and starkly accentuated the forehead and cheekbones of her shield-shaped face. Yes, that’s it. And now he noticed something he hadn’t seen before—a little bitty hump to the ridge of her nose. Not an Irish nose , he told himself. Not the nose of an O’Day. Her mouth, too, had something exotic about it—a little wide for her jawline, with lips spread apart, as if frozen in the beginning of a smile.
    What was that about her husband? Harry had never noticed a ring on Ali’s finger, and in the three months he had been at Fletcher Memorial, he had never seen this man with her. Kevin, that’s what his name was. Even now, she never glanced at Kevin in that fleeting, automatic way that husbands and wives did when they needed to get a