Chapter 1101: Five Hundred Yards
June 1997
"Damn it! You can't read that! Ms. Kelly!"
Dr. House shrieked and snatched the file out of the hands of Mariah, who'd been standing there with it in a kind of trance. "That's patient privacy. Let's get back to business. APLUS still has something seriously wrong with him. He needs my treatment, and I can coordinate with the surgical side and move the operation up. How about that?"
His little piece of stagecraft didn't work. Mariah had just read APLUS's own account of his state of mind before and after the affair, and she didn't produce the explosion House had set the moment up for. She only looked a little lost, and stood up.
"No. He can like whoever he likes now and do whatever he wants. My part in this is over."
"Ms. Kelly, he's extremely unstable, physically and emotionally. He just doesn't know it yet. Five months of atrophy, kidneys on a machine since February, and something happened in his brain that nobody in this building has identified!"
House followed her out into the corridor, making one last try. Two nurses at the station gave up pretending to write.
"Dr. House — to you a craniotomy is like playing a video game, isn't it?" Mariah stopped and looked back at him. "You couldn't find the answer, so you want to start another game. But he doesn't get to start his life over."
"That is not—"
"No operation. Ask him yourself. I'm not signing anything." Her heels went off down the corridor.
The file was his psychiatric history, the notes from his sessions with doctors over the years, in his own words. Mariah had held his medical proxy since May, so when she'd held her hand out for his chart at four in the morning, a resident who couldn't think of a reason to say no had handed her all of it.
In the room, Alex had his eyes open.
"No, no, no. I want to make one more effort first. Call it a chance for a man who worked for me for seven years."
Sloane looked at him a moment longer than she needed to. "That isn't your style!"
"My... what style?"
"You hit back, and fast. You don't let sentiment drag a thing out. You've never given anybody a second chance in your life."
She had a point. In 1994 he'd fired a tour accountant over a rounding error in the morning and had the desk cleared by lunch. The accountant had been right, he'd been wrong, and he still hadn't taken the man back.
"I got shot half to death and then spent five months in a coma, Sloane. Something changes in a person after that."
"Something like... going soft?"
He turned his head an inch on the pillow. "Soft? Fuck you, Sloane. I can't lift a phone. You want me to go to war from a bed with a straw in my mouth? Call Alicia in the morning. Not tonight."
"Hh! Fine. Morning. If you're dead by then I'm telling everybody I warned you."
Old Mike had herded Brenda and the others off down the corridor. Mariah stopped in the doorway and listened to the two of them talk. Little Rhaegar had got himself up the blanket and was crawling off his father's chest toward the edge of the bed, and one careful forearm was laid across the route as a barrier. That was all the parenting the man had in him right now. He'd lost a great deal of weight. His skin was paler than it used to be, his upper body was swallowed up by the big soft pillow, and there was always that look on his face, the look of somebody putting up with pain.
A kid not even a year old seemed to be the stronger of the two. Rhaegar giggled and shoved his father's weak arm out of the way.
Mariah came in quietly to head her son off before he went over the side.
Alex looked up at her. She had his son on her hip and her eyes were red.
Sloane stopped talking and walked over to the window.
"How did it go with the doctor?" Alex asked.
"I don't know." She shifted the baby to the other hip and didn't sit down.
Mariah was thinking about the file she'd just read. It was full of other women — Sherilyn above all — and his whole progress of mind, from nothing really happened to sleeping with her again. Her feelings about it were complicated and contradictory, and yet she couldn't get angry. Maybe it didn't matter now. They were divorced, after all.
Or maybe, if she hadn't fought with him all the time, and above all if she hadn't kept swinging the business of his cheating before the wedding at his head, he wouldn't have ended up in other women's arms. The same file had it in his own words, how miserable he felt after their fights, and how guilty he felt after the cheating...
"You don't know what?" Alex said. He found this very odd.
"I understand every word in it and I don't understand any of it, you know? There's a page in there where you apologize to a doctor. To a doctor. And the handwriting on the last two pages isn't even yours."
She got the corner of her eye with a knuckle. "Anyway. You're awake, so you can make your own decisions, and I never have to sign anything for you ever again."
"Don't cry. Today's supposed to be a good day."
"Hmph." She wiped her face with the flat of her hand and didn't look at him.
"Rhaegar, look. Look at me. Is Daddy happy or not? Hey..."
The baby put both hands flat on his father's face and pressed. Mariah sat down on the edge of the bed and let him do it, and the two of them played with their son for a while. He loved Rhaegar, at least. On that count her ex-husband was beyond reproach. In the will he'd made while he was still absurdly young, he'd left the biggest share of his fortune to Rhaegar, and the rest to the two or three kids he had by other women. Not a cent to her. She'd checked.
"APLUS." Cochran was in the doorway in a coat over a suit, with a briefcase that obviously hadn't left his hand since New York. "It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. This is a miracle."
He came to the foot of the bed with his hand already out and stood there sighing over and over.
Cochran charged like the most famous lawyer in America, and he was worth it.
Five months under, and then awake, and every ugly thing people had been hiding around him had come up where he could see it. Cochran, who was determined to fight CBS down to the last inch, was one man he could trust without question.
Alex tried to sit up and got stopped. What Cochran got instead of a handshake was two fingers and a thumb, and he learned more from that than from anything the dean had told him downstairs.
"No, no — don't get up. Look at that. You're coming back fast."
Alex dropped his voice, and Cochran had to lean in for it. "Am I? Good. Then I need you on the early plane to Chicago. McGill & Hamlin — one floor above A+ Records."
Cochran had a folder open against his forearm. "Tomorrow morning. Car from O'Hare, straight up, and if the floor's locked I'll have building management open it. What am I looking for?"
"Jimmy McGill. The younger brother. He's been doing my paperwork since the week he passed the bar."
Cochran billed by the hour and didn't waste a minute of it. "Is he in it? If his name is on the transfers I need to know before I walk in there and put my hand out. I'm not getting my picture taken hugging a co-defendant."
"No. And don't scare him. Just bring him back with you."
"Fine, I'll bring him back in one piece. And McGill?"
"If McGill sends somebody to talk, they talk to you. Not me, not Alicia, not Sloane. You. And you give them one message to take back: he gives me my money back and I won't do anything to him."
Cochran's eyebrows went up. "That's a lot to let a man walk away from, APLUS. Just for giving back what he took. I could put that man in a cell."
"Sloane's people think they took about fifty-nine million. They ran it through Icahn's funds, and Icahn takes his cut on the way through. If McGill hands back what's left, I get most of my money this summer. If I sue him, it's two years before I see a dime, and half of it goes to lawyers. No offense."
"None taken. You're not wrong, either, that's the annoying part." Cochran wanted to argue anyway. He looked at the man in the bed, who couldn't lift a telephone yet and couldn't sit through a deposition, and shut the folder.
"Take the seven o'clock. Call Sloane when you've got Jimmy."
It was past four. Mariah scooped up her son and stood with him against her shoulder. So he'd got himself a lawyer, which meant there was nobody left for her to be the guardian of.
"It's late. Come on, let's go say goodnight to Daddy." She took Rhaegar's fat little hand and waved it at the bed. "We'll come back tomorrow."
He got two fingers up off the blanket and waved them back. "Bye, Rhaegar. Mimi." And then, to her back: "Thank you for getting me moved, Mimi. I mean it."
She stopped in the door and looked at him. "Okay," she said, and went.
Lee Phillips did the rest of it on the bed table with Cochran: the discharge against medical advice, the waiver, and an order keeping Dr. House five hundred yards away from the patient, which he said he'd have signed before six.
The hospital didn't mind the discharge form. The form moved the risk off the hospital and onto the patient, so both sides wanted it signed, and it got signed.
"Mr. Geffen sends his regards," Phillips said on his way out. "If you're going back to Chicago soon, he'll come and see you there."
"Good. Thank him for me. And thank you for helping Mimi get me transferred." Alex lifted his arm an inch or two.
Maybe they'd wanted him moved to the Mayo Clinic for reasons of their own, with plans attached. That didn't matter right now. They'd helped him. Now that he was awake he had plenty of enemies to get on with. More than enough.
"Ha, heh." Phillips leaned in and shook his hand. "You get some rest, APLUS."
When the two lawyers had gone, Sloane came back from the window with the folder still shut. "Are you really going to sue... this hospital? You woke up under their treatment. Their notes are clean, the dean signed every order, their lawyer's already put the cost of five months in front of you — and you know how far Princeton reaches—"
"Forget it. I was angry, that's all. Just angry."
"Good. I don't know a thing about medicine, but keep your temper down and your mood up, okay?" She smoothed the blanket over his chest and left her palm there a second. "I didn't sit in that hotel for five months so you could give yourself a stroke yelling at a lawyer."
He was looking at the ceiling. "Get word to O'Grady at Northern Trust. Not tonight — tomorrow, from Chicago, on a landline, and not the house one. Tell him I want to talk about Thailand."
"Thailand." Sloane stared at him. "You've been awake one night. He'll want a reason. Nobody calls him from a landline about Thailand."
He yawned, and it took a while. "Their currency. The baht. Old Joe put every dollar he owns into a Thai bank because the interest is wonderful. Ha. I want to know what it costs to bet against it."
He didn't have to guess at this one. The Crash had given him the second of July: the Bank of Thailand giving up and the baht coming off the board. What he'd tell O'Grady was only what was in the papers already. The baht was pegged to the dollar, the Thai banks had borrowed dollars short and lent them out long on condos in Bangkok, and every speculator from New York to Hong Kong had been leaning on the peg since spring.
For more than ten years the Bank of Thailand had held the baht at around twenty-five to the dollar, and that promise was what had let Thai banks and property developers borrow dollars cheaply abroad and never think about the exchange rate. In February a Bangkok developer called Somprasong Land had missed a payment on its foreign debt. In the middle of May the hedge funds had hit the baht all at once, and the central bank had spent billions of dollars of its reserves buying baht to hold the line, then cut foreign banks off from borrowing baht in Bangkok so they couldn't sell what they didn't have.
Betting against a currency worked like shorting a stock. You borrowed baht, or signed a contract to deliver them later, and sold them for dollars at twenty-five. If the peg broke and the baht fell to thirty or forty, you bought them back cheap and kept the difference. What it cost you in the meantime was the interest on the baht you owed, and the Bank of Thailand had pushed short-term rates sky-high in May precisely to make that hurt. What he had on top of that was the Korean film, the won going off a cliff in November and the IMF man with his list. The documentary hadn't had Korea in it at all. Default had nothing else.
"Thailand, the baht, O'Grady, a landline. Anything else? Want me to short the moon while I'm at it?"
"How much would the moon cost?"
"Go to sleep, APLUS." She was laughing, and she pushed the hair off his forehead with her fingers.
He fell asleep in the middle of it without noticing.
He woke to Dile's voice coming out of a radio turned low, and for a second he didn't move at all.
"Is that Dile? Turn it up."
Old Mike was already on his feet. "You're awake? I'll go get a doctor—" He went out the door happy.
"Is it the next day?" Some of his strength had come back, and he asked it with a smile.
"It is. It's past noon."
Sloane and Yeremov both laughed. "The news that you woke up was on this morning," Sloane said, and turned the dial up. It had led at six on three networks and been on the wires before that, and Yeremov's two lines had gone out at ten the night before exactly as written.
Dile was on a syndicated afternoon show out of Chicago and had been talking for twenty minutes. He was telling the Beatles story for the second time that hour. Years back, in the booth, Dile had heard a line in one of APLUS's new songs that sounded like a Beatles record and asked him whether he'd sampled it without clearing it.
"And he just looked blank and said he might have heard that Beatles song somewhere, and went right back to the board. He hadn't even realized it. We laughed at him about that for a long time."
Dile laughed. The host laughed with him. "He didn't realize it while he was writing it?"
"No! That's what he's like. He hardly ever comes into the studio. Every time, he just suddenly shows up with a finished thing, and I mean finished, and tells us to track it this way, that way, which instrument, which synth patch. For a while there I honestly thought he had a dozen songwriters locked up in his basement."
"Ha! He's an absolute musical genius."
"The kind of genius the rest of us mortals aren't built to understand." Dile's voice went sad. "Maybe genius always draws a hard fate, you know?"
"Now that he's awake — and I think everybody listening wants to know this — when are you getting on a plane to go and see him?"
"I called his hospital twice this morning and they wouldn't put me through, which, you know, I understand. I'll get out there as fast as I possibly can. He and I have some things to say to each other, face to face."
Sloane made a small contemptuous noise and switched it off. "Hmph. He's threatening you from a distance."
While Alex was in the coma, Dile had lined up a stock market listing for Musical America with McGill and Hamlin's help, and cut his old partner down to a minority on the way.
"Yeah. He is."
"What do you want done with him?"
He said it with no heat at all. "Give Dile to Alicia. Just Dile. She blocks the Musical America listing, gets him out of the A+ Audio presidency, and sues him if she has to. Nothing else. Tell her I'm not well enough yet to give her more."
"And the shares?"
"Leave them alone. Whatever they've diluted me down to, leave it."
Sloane put the folder down on her knee.
The way it worked was simple. While the man who owned the company was lying in a coma, you issued a pile of new stock to somebody friendly. By the time he woke up he owned a lot less of it than he used to. It only took a board vote, and McGill and Hamlin had been two of the three directors. The third was Alex, and his name had gone on the consent under the firm's power of attorney. A Delaware judge might call it a breach of duty, but every step of it had a signed resolution behind it.
"That site has a hundred thousand registered users and an underwriter carrying a four-hundred-million-dollar range on it! You got diluted down to forty-nine percent while you were unconscious, by a man who's probably driving somewhere between here and Canada right now."
For a website, in the middle of 1997, with Netscape and Yahoo trading where they were, four hundred million wasn't even a stretch.
He shrugged against the pillow. It hurt, and he did it anyway. "I own the songs. Let them have the website. One thing at a time, Sloane."
At that same hour Cochran had already landed in Chicago on the early flight. He took a cab straight to McGill & Hamlin, one floor above the A+ Records offices.
"Ugh."
He was in the same trade, and he understood the whole thing the second the elevator doors opened. No clients coming or going. No company security on the door. Just a knot of law-firm employees standing around outside it, talking to each other and looking over at him suspiciously.
"Mr. Cochran." One of them recognized him.
He ignored her and pushed the door open. Paper all over the carpet, torn and whole. A few employees clearing out their personal things at their desks. Hamlin's liquor still standing in the open cabinet with two glasses beside it, and a smell of something burnt coming off a wastebasket in the corner.
They'd left in a hell of a hurry.
"Why go to all this trouble..." Cochran said to himself.
A young man was standing in the middle of McGill's office in a suit and no tie, treading on blank sheets of paper without noticing he was doing it, lost somewhere in his own head.
"Jimmy?"
The young man turned round. Cochran put the briefcase down on the nearest desk. "Jimmy. I'm Johnnie Cochran. APLUS sent me. He wants you to come home."
"Ms. Fenn, push! Push harder!"
At the obstetrics hospital near Highland Park the midwife was coaching Sherilyn, who was soaked through to the shoulders on the delivery bed. Nine of her relatives were out in the corridor in twos and threes, telling each other nervously about last night's news, the miracle in New Jersey, the baby's father waking up.
"There. There we are..."
It went smoothly. Not long after, there was a baby howling at the top of her lungs.
"It's a girl! Seven pounds one, and she's got a pair of lungs on her. Have you settled on a name, Ms. Fenn?" the midwife asked, taking care not to jostle her.
"Sansa," Sherilyn said, satisfied. Then she said it again, louder, past the midwife at the open door and the relatives out there. "Sansa! Her name is Sansa. Sansa Song. S-A-N-S-A. Write it on the card in full and don't let them shorten it downstairs."
The corridor went quiet. Then an aunt out there said, "What kind of name is Sansa? Is that Italian?" and her mother said, "Leave her alone, Dot, she just pushed out seven pounds," and a cousin at the far end was already arguing that it sounded like a car.
"Has anybody called the hospital in New Jersey?"
"The hospital doesn't make that kind of call, Ms. Fenn."
"Then give me the phone!" She had her hand out for it already.
On the tray by the bed, under her reading glasses, there was a photograph cut out of a magazine: a man on the stage at Orchestra Hall with a baton up and gold light coming down on him.
"I'll go into Tribeca and get you some clothes. Try this on."
In Princeton, Mariah had her assistant set the travel bag down, took an Armani suit out of it and worked her ex-husband into the jacket one sleeve at a time.
Alex slowly turned his head to look at the shoulder pads standing out on either side of him, and lifted his arms. The sleeves were empty and way too long, and the body of the thing was a wind tunnel.
"Heh. Looks like I'm going to have to buy a new wardrobe."
Mariah couldn't stand the sad sight of him, and made herself smile and joke about it. "Oh my God, you look like a coat rack. Take it off! I'll send somebody for the grey one, the Milan one, there's no shoulder in it at all — no. No, that one's at Bedford."
She stood back and looked him over with her head on o