The Select (6 page)

"No, I mean somebody
famous."

He spotted him. Tall, lean, striding
toward the curved stairway with Dr. Alston. Tim lifted his dark
glasses for a better look. Strong features, dark hair graying at
the temples, distinguished looking in a tailored gray
suit.

Matt returned then, carrying a plate
heaped with scrambled eggs and hash browns. He cocked his head
toward the newcomer.

"Isn't he—?"

At that instant the name
clicked. "Senator Jefferson Stephen Whitney," Tim said. "Or I guess
I should say,
former
U.S. Senator Whitney."

"And I'll bet he was in that private
helicopter that just landed," Quinn said.

Tim nodded. They'd all stood at the
windows watching it whir down at the heliport behind the medical
center.

The image of an article
from
The Wall Street Journal
flashed before Tim's eyes with a photo. He'd come
across it while researching an economics paper on the inflationary
recession of the 1970's. He saw the header now:

Sen. Whitney cancels
campaign.

Accepts new foundation
post.

"He was a hot-shot, young-turk senator
in the seventies," Tim said. "Made lots of waves in trying to
revamp the FDA. Wasn't popular nationally but people in Wisconsin
loved him. Looked like he was going to be right up there for a long
time, but when it came time for re-election, he opted out and took
a position with the Kleederman Foundation. He's been on its Board
ever since."

"That explains why he's here," Quinn
said.

"Right. The Kleederman Foundation is
paying for this breakfast we're eating—"

"That
two
of us are eating," Matt said
pointedly as he eyed Quinn's barely-touched shredded
wheat.

"—and all the rest of The Ingraham's
bills."

Dr. Alston and the former senator had
mounted the stairway to the landing at the halfway mark and stopped
to face the cafeteria. Tim noticed that a microphone and stand had
been rigged on the landing.

"Good morning, everyone," Dr. Alston
said. "I trust you all slept well and are enjoying the breakfast
that The Ingraham's staff has prepared for you."

Polite scattered applause.

"We are privileged this morning to
have a surprise visit from former United States Senator Jefferson
Whitney, a director of the Kleederman Foundation, the magnanimous
organization responsible for the founding and funding of The
Ingraham College of Medicine. Senator?"

Tim noted that this round of applause
was less scattered and more vigorous. Even he joined in. After all,
this guy represented the deep pockets that supported this
place.

"Good morning," Whitney said, flashing
an easy-going smile that gleamed even through Tim's shades. "I know
you're all on tenter hooks and anxious to get to the test, and I
know I won't have your rapt and undivided attention, so I'll be
brief." Whitney paused, then: "You see today as an all-important
day for your future."

Tim glanced at Quinn and saw her blond
head nod once, almost imperceptibly.

"But you should not lose
sight of the fact that this is an important day for The Ingraham as
well. You are the cream of the crop. Your college careers are
testimonies to your desire to strive for and your ability to
achieve excellence. You are the people we want as Ingraham
students, as Ingraham graduates. This is not a situation of you,
the individual, against us, the institution. We're not trying to
keep any of you out. We
want
you here. We'd love to take you all. We wish we
could
afford
to
take you all. Unfortunately, the Kleederman Foundation's funds are
finite.

"But for those of you who are
accepted, what a world will be opened to you! Not only will you
receive the gift of the finest medical education in the world, but
you will have a chance to go out and shape the future of American
medicine, to make it the model and envy of every country on
Earth.

"So I wish you all well in today's
examination. And please remember that no matter what happens in the
coming months, each and every one of you is already a winner. I
know I speak for The Ingraham College of Medicine and the
Kleederman Foundation when I say that we are proud of all of
you."

More applause. Tim clapped
mechanically.

"Amazing," he said.
"Platitudes trip off his tongue as if they'd sprung into his
mind
de
novo
."

Quinn looked at him sharply. "I think
it was very nice of him to take the time and come speak to us. I
mean we're just applicants. None of us has even been accepted yet.
Give him a break, will you?"

Tim winced. He was
not
scoring points with
Quinn.

Why was he attracted to
this twitchy, type-A ingenue anyway? She was sweet-looking, bright,
and she had a nice butt. So what? The same could be said of plenty
of other girls he knew. Obviously she disapproved of him and his
style. So what else was new? Plenty of people disapproved of him.
He liked it when uptight people disapproved of him. He
reveled
in it. So why
did her little put down bother him?

And why the hell was he racking his
brain now for a way to mollify her?

Matt, ever the peacemaker, said, "Tim
doesn't trust politicians."

"Senator Whitney isn't a politician.
He heads a foundation."

"The fact that everybody still calls
him Senator Whitney says something," Tim said. "I hear he spends
most of his time lobbying his old cronies at the Senate. Once a
politician, always a politician." Tim raised his orange juice glass
in Whitney's direction. "But if he's going to foot the bill for med
school for me, he's a prince."

Another cool look from Quinn. This was
going nowhere. He took his empty plate and stood up.

"Seconds anyone?"

*

Tim chewed the eraser on the back end
of his #2 pencil as he considered question number 200.

The test was a bitch.

A lot like the MCAT only worse. The
biology questions were off the wall. The chemistry questions were
even tougher. This baby was out to separate the men from the boys,
not to mention the women from the girls.

Tim glanced around. About twenty-five
of the hopefuls had been seated in this classroom, the rest were
scattered through the class building. Nothing special here. Green
chalk board across the front of the room, gray tile floor, overhead
fluorescents, a pair of TV monitors suspended from the ceiling, and
one-piece desks. Only the life-size skeleton hanging in the rear
corner offered any clue that the room was on a medical school
campus. In the seat to his left, Quinn's brow was furrowed in
concentration as her foot beat a soft, nervous tattoo on the floor.
To his right, Matt was hunched over his exam booklet, scribbling
figures on his scratch sheets. All around Tim, nervous people
trying to score for their future.

He could almost hear them
sweat.

Not that Tim was taking this lightly
himself. His folks could manage to send him to med school, but it
wouldn't be pocket change like for Matt's family—not even close.
They'd have to make some sacrifices, maybe get a home equity loan,
but they'd find a way to come up with it. And gladly. Still, it
would make things a hell of a lot easier for them if Tim got
accepted here.

But taking pressure off his family was
only part of why he was sweating this exam. A small part. The big
part was being free. Making it into The Ingraham would be a sort of
declaration of independence. No more checks for dad to write for
tuition, room, and board. For the first time Tim would be one
hundred percent self-sufficient. He'd feel like a man. That would
be great.

But question 200 was
strange.

It asked for the first
corollary of the Kleederman equation. No problem there. Tim knew
the answer. Trouble was, he couldn't figure out
how
he knew it.

Usually he could simply picture the
book, page, and paragraph where he'd read about any given subject.
It just came to him, as naturally and easily as breathing. He
remembered how as a kid he used to wow the grown-ups at family
gatherings. Someone would hand him a driver license, he'd glance at
it, hand it back, then reel off every letter and number on it. Next
he'd do a page from a magazine, and then go to his grand finale: a
page from the phone book. They thought he was a genius, but Tim
came to understand that his ability had nothing to do with
intelligence—it was simply the way his brain worked.

But what about now? Johann
Kleederman—Tim could see before him a page from
U.S. News & World Report
, an
article on Kleederman and his foundation. Born in Switzerland in
1935, where he and his wealthy parents weathered World War Two.
Johann took over the reins of the family pharmaceutical company
after his father's death in 1960, and immediately began a rapid
extension into the U.S. market. He set up his Foundation in 1968,
and became a pioneer of managed health care during the seventies.
He'd spent the latter half of the eighties and early nineties
buying up nursing homes and turning financially-troubled hospitals
into medical centers, a move considered by many to be eccentric and
financially risky. Still, the medical centers and nursing homes
controlled by Kleederman Medical Industies, a multinational
conglomerate that included the innovative and extraordinarily
profitable Kleederman Pharmaceuticals, were considered the best
managed, most cost-effective healthcare facilities in the world.
Tim even could see an old photo of the reclusive, balding,
mutton-chop-sideburned Kleederman in the upper left corner of the
page.

But the Kleederman equation? Nothing
in the article about that. No picture came. Just the
answer.

Tim gave a mental shrug and blackened
the "B" box next to 200 on his answer sheet. Who cared? When the
sheet went through the grading computer, the machine wasn't going
to ask how anyone got the answer. It was only going to note if the
response was correct or incorrect.

And correct was definitely
better.

The next two questions also referred
to the Kleederman equation. These answers too popped unbidden into
his mind. So be it. He marked them down and went on.

The questions changed after that.
Science segued into general knowledge. Tim had seen some of this on
the MCAT, but there was much more of it here—from who won last
year's World Series to the name of the Impressionist who painted
"Starry Night" to the first name of the 18th-century British
cabinet maker for whom the Chippendale style was named.

Tim smiled to himself. He
knew what The Ingraham was up to: trying to weed out the science
nerds, the oddballs who spent their entire lives hunching over
microscopes or squinting at computer monitors without ever looking
out the window to see what was going on in the world. They might be
brilliant, they might be able to breeze through the toughest p-chem
questions, but they fit the definition of culturally deprived.
They'd make great researchers, but a medical degree would be wasted
on them. They could be
doctors
but never
physicians
. And the Ingraham wanted
to graduate
physicians
.

After the general knowledge section
the questions got weird.

They baffled Tim. Strange questions
involving values and decision-making: about being a general in a
battle and deciding who was expendable, about being a surgeon in a
M.A.S.H. unit surrounded by wounded soldiers—instead of goofy
jokers like the TV show—and having to decide who would be treated
now and who would have to wait until later.

Triage.

There didn't seem to be any one
correct answer to these.

Tim felt paralyzed. He'd spent years
matching the right answer to the right question. But now there was
no right answer.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe The
Ingraham wasn't looking so much for answers to the questions as it
was looking for answers about the person taking the
test.

The realization galvanized Tim. This
was great. All he had to go was dive into these and cut loose. But
not too loose. He had to consider the kind of answer these folks
were looking for.

*

Finished.

Tim glanced at his watch. Ten minutes
to spare. Everything done. All his four hundred multiple choices
had an A, B, C, D, or E box blackened to the right of it. No sense
in going back and rechecking. Too many. And besides, he was
drained. He couldn't bear to read and answer one more goddamn
question about anything.

He glanced over at Quinn. She was
still working down at the bottom of the last row. She'd finish in
time. He was turning away to check on Matt when he noticed two
unanswered questions at the top of one of her columns. He checked
his exam booklet. Those were two of the Kleederman
questions.