by Adam Hamdy
‘Parathyroid glands produce a hormone, PTH, that is essential for breathing. Without it, a person dies of asphyxiation almost instantly.’
‘Please don’t kill me,’ Brigitte begged.
‘Which is why we include a third ingredient in the patch. Can you guess what it is?’ the man asked as he removed the plastic backing strips.
Brigitte tried to shake her head.
‘It’s PTH. The third ingredient is what a person needs to keep them alive,’ the man said.
Brigitte struggled to understand. Why destroy the parathyroid glands, only to replace the very hormone they produced? And then the answer came, tumbling though her mind like a falling star. To create dependency. Without the patches, a person would die. And that person would do anything for the product that kept them alive.
‘Please don’t put that on me,’ Brigitte implored.
The man pulled back the sweat-soaked blanket to reveal Brigitte’s naked torso. She looked down in horror and saw a black patch was already clinging to her shoulder.
I already have one on me, her mind screamed. They already have me.
Chapter 56
‘If I didn’t put it on you, you’d soon die.’ The man ripped off the old patch and stuck the fresh one in its place. ‘You need this now, Chloe.’
The fentanyl high was instant and tremendously powerful and Brigitte’s concerns were lost to an opiate fog. She fought the blissful stupor and clung to her fear, to the horror of what had happened, finally understanding the full terrible significance of what she’d just learned.
‘You want to . . .’ she slurred.
‘Sorry,’ the man said, smiling as he leaned closer. ‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘You want to take this into America, don’t you?’ she remarked.
The man’s face seemed to bubble and warp as he nodded. ‘We know you have seen the effects of our pharmacology experiments. You told us all about it. The prison escape in Cairo was an aerosolized version of XTX. This,’ he held up the old patch, ‘this is a work of art. Opioids are already killing thousands of Americans every year. Those who don’t die live as shadow people, costing society greatly. Imagine what our product will do. Imagine millions of people hooked on a drug that is the only thing that keeps them alive. What would they be prepared to do for their weekly fix?’ He paused and stroked Brigitte’s forehead. ‘What will you do, Chloe?’
Brigitte struggled to take in the implications of such a thing. Even if her mind hadn’t been lost to the powerful synthetic opiate, she doubted she would have been able to process what had just happened to her, and its significance for the wider world. The leverage this drug – no, this weapon – would give this man, and the people he worked for, was beyond anything Brigitte could imagine.
‘What would the American government do to keep its people alive?’ the man asked. ‘What would any government do?’
A chemical weapon that was highly addictive and capable of delivering mass casualties over a prolonged period of time. It was the stuff of nightmares. A million addicts, and their lives could be held to ransom, changing the geopolitical landscape forever.
‘I see you understand,’ the man said, backing away, and Brigitte realized she was crying. ‘Tell her what she is to do for us,’ he instructed Echo, before he picked up the case and left the room.
‘I’m sorry,’ Echo said when he was gone. ‘I told you certain decisions aren’t ours to make.’ She unbuttoned the cuff of her blouse and rolled her sleeve up to reveal a black patch on her shoulder. Her eyes glistened as she watched Brigitte register its significance. ‘I was sent here to investigate intelligence we’d received that the Red Wolves were experimenting with such things. They knew why I was here,’ her voice cracked, and her eyes filled to bursting. Brigitte wanted to comfort her, but still couldn’t move her hands. ‘Someone in Beijing is helping them. I was betrayed. They did to me what they’ve done to you. They told me to leave the service. They made me bring my family here.’ Echo broke down entirely. ‘I’m sorry, Chloe. I didn’t want this for you. But I had to,’ she sobbed. ‘They say they will do this to my children if I don’t do exactly what they ask.’ She choked back loud cries and looked at the door anxiously. ‘I can’t escape. There is nowhere else in the world that makes these things,’ she tapped her patch. ‘If it isn’t changed every seven days, we die.’
Brigitte smiled darkly. A long sleep sounded blissful compared to the horror she was now living.
‘The effects of the fentanyl are worst for the first day or so of a new patch, then they settle down,’ Echo said.
You think I’m high, Echo, Brigitte thought. I’m not. I’m just at peace. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get her mouth to form the words.
Echo took a tissue from a box on the trolley and wiped Brigitte’s mouth. Was she drooling?
‘Wha . . .’ Brigitte managed to say after a concerted effort.
‘What do they want?’ Echo guessed.
Brigitte said yes with her eyes.
‘They’re opening a supply line into the United States,’ Echo said. ‘They want you to start building one into Europe.’
As she lay with her head pressed against the damp pillow, Brigitte thought about this lethal twisted weapon hitting the streets of Europe. Sober she would have seen only the horror, but in her stupor, coddled by the powerful drug, she also saw beauty. Her opium-addled mind couldn’t think of a more blissful way for a multitude of people to die.
Chapter 57
Pearce waited on the corner of Massachusetts Street and Alaskan Way, opposite the St Martin Shelter. A line of people snaked around the corner of the austere concrete building, desperate folk in dirty, ragged clothes, there for a morning meal. A small group of men and women who’d been lucky enough to have already been served sat smoking beneath a green awning near the entrance. There were no smiles and very little hope in the faces of the young and old. Most showed signs of drug or alcohol addiction; swollen hands – an early sign of oedema – flaking skin, and eyes wild and hollow as though they’d been opened too wide and could never be closed. Pearce was shocked by the number of lost souls in this largely industrial neighbourhood, but this was a story replicated the world over; growing poverty brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Rasul had instructed Pearce to be on the corner at nine thirty and had offered no plan or explanation. It might have been simple for Pearce to join the periphery of the Salamov organization, but he clearly still didn’t have the man’s trust. After the meeting at Al Jamaea coffee shop, Pearce had returned to the New La Hacienda motel and discussed the evening’s events with Leila. She’d been watching via Pearce’s surveillance glasses, but seemed disengaged and distracted, and his efforts to get her to open up had failed. She’d spent the night infiltrating the Seattle Police Department’s network, pulling up intelligence reports on the city’s gangs. Delridge was under the control of the East Hill Mob, an unsophisticated but violent street gang that ran the neighbourhood drugs trade and had been implicated in a number of homicides. Pearce suspected these were the people Rasul had spoken of, the ones he believed had stolen his product.
Pearce watched the flow of traffic in all directions. Massachusetts Street went west for a few hundred yards before coming to an end by a port gatehouse near the waterfront. Alaskan Way was an access road that ran alongside the Highway 99 overpass. This was an ugly, functional place used to get from A to B. The only people who lived in such areas were those who were trapped; sidelined and kept away from the productive folk who hustled to and fro along the busy roads. Pearce noticed five gleaming SUVs driving south along Alaskan Way, and when they stopped at the corner, he saw Rasul in the front passenger seat of the lead vehicle.
‘Subtle,’ Leila said into Pearce’s ear. She was watching everything via the surveillance glasses he wore.
‘Yeah,’ Pearce agreed as he walked towards the convoy.
Rasul lowered his window. ‘Get in,’ he said.
Pearce glanced at
the trailing convoy and saw four or five men in each car. He nodded and climbed inside Rasul’s car. He recognized the three other faces immediately. The driver and the two on the back seat were the men Pearce had seen coming out of the bookshop after Ziad’s meeting with Deni, Rasul and Abbas. They were muscle – career criminals with long records of violence.
‘This is Osman, Ilman and Surkho,’ Rasul told Pearce. ‘This is Amr,’ he said to the others. ‘Give him a tool.’
Osman, a large man with a downturned mouth and a sour face, leaned forward and produced a pistol and two clips from a holdall in the footwell. He handed them to Pearce.
‘OK?’ Rasul asked, as Pearce checked the weapon.
The action was a little stiff and could have used some oil, but it would do.
‘Fine,’ Pearce replied.
Chapter 58
They drove through Fairmont Park, which had all the trappings of a middle-class neighbourhood. Large houses stood in big plots at the side of wide, tree-lined streets, but here and there were the gnawing rust patches of poverty. Gaunt men and women with hungry eyes gathered outside apartment blocks, repossession notices were pasted to the doors of a few homes, children in filthy clothes played in yards.
‘Synthetics,’ Rasul said, nodding at a couple of emaciated men who couldn’t have been more than thirty.
They were sitting on the porch of a large house, rubbing something on their gums, and when they looked up at the passing motorcade, Pearce saw their spaced-out eyes. Their young faces were wrinkled and covered in sores and bruises. Unemployment had rocketed around the world, and with it a desperation to escape.
‘Sometimes I disagree with my father,’ Rasul remarked. ‘There’s a lot of profit in these drugs. But then I see what they do to people, to neighbourhoods. This one is already turning. In Washington state, more people die from synthetic opioids than from car accidents. And the death toll hides the true cost, the destruction of lives. Of cities.’
Pearce thought it odd to hear a smuggler denigrating other drug dealers, but in any field of human endeavour there was a moral pecking order that made some believe they had the right to judge others. ‘Supplied by the people we’re going to see?’ he asked.
Rasul nodded. ‘The East Hill Mob manufacture and distribute synthetics. Small scale, but enough to feed the parts of the city they control. Which is why their sudden shift to a more natural product –’ Pearce guessed he was talking about heroin – ‘didn’t go unnoticed. No one starts trying to shift that kind of volume from nowhere, unless they’ve ripped off someone else’s stash.’
‘What kind of opposition are we expecting?’ Pearce asked.
‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Rasul replied.
Four blocks later, the convoy stopped on Fauntleroy Way beside two apartment blocks. Tucked beside them was a small tumbledown single-storey house. The yellow paint that covered the aluminium siding was chipped and flaking, and the dusty front yard was covered by scattered toys, scraps of rusty metal and garbage. A couple of women spilled out of the little house and staggered across the porch to a two-seater swing that might have once looked charming, but was now bone-white with neglect and age. The women were in their underwear, revealing skeletal frames covered in bruises and sores. One pulled her lank hair away from her face and sparked a lighter that ignited the contents of a glass pipe. She inhaled deeply and her eyes rolled back momentarily before she came to. With her mind somewhere else, she handed the pipe to her ponytailed friend, who repeated the process.
‘In there,’ Rasul said, pointing at the house, ‘you’ll find a man called Otter. He’s a corner boy who shifts product for the East Hill Mob. He’ll know where they’ve got the merchandise. Make him tell you.’
‘Alone?’ Pearce asked.
‘Consider it your initiation,’ Rasul replied.
If Pearce had been commanding these men, he too would have sent his most expendable asset into this potentially volatile location. If that asset was lost, the cost to the organization would be minimal. Pearce had assessed the situation correctly; he was cannon fodder.
He stepped out of the car, slipped the pistol into the waistband of his jeans and lifted his leather jacket over the butt to conceal it. He crossed the pavement and walked through the litter-strewn front yard towards the porch.
‘Hey, friend,’ the woman with the ponytail said. ‘You got any dough?’
‘I’m looking for Otter,’ Pearce replied.
‘Otter can’t give you what we can,’ she said, stroking her companion’s arm.
Pearce guessed she was trying to be suggestive, but her companion was completely out of it; she keeled at her touch, and hung limp over the arm of the swing.
‘Is he inside?’ Pearce asked.
‘Twenty bucks for an answer,’ she slurred.
Pearce ignored her and walked inside. He had seen some hellish places, but this house ranked as one of the worst. Everything of value had been stripped; light fittings, switches, sockets, pipes, even patches of plasterboard and flooring. Rot was eating the outer structure and Pearce could see bare earth through the holes in the floor. He peered into the first room, which was in a similar state of dilapidation, and saw a figure huddled beneath a blanket, head turned towards a television that had been smashed. A breeze came through a broken window and Pearce could hear one of the women on the porch humming an unrecognizable tune. Something in the room was giving off a terrible stench, and Pearce noticed a bucket in the far corner. He didn’t need to see inside to know it was a makeshift toilet. He’d had to take morphine a couple of times to deal with the pain of injury; he knew drugs didn’t stop people being human, they just stopped them caring. He imagined the snatched moments of sobriety experienced by the inhabitants of this house, when they’d look around in horror at what their lives had become. What better way to escape the rotten squalor than the carefree bliss of narcotics? And so their descent became inevitable and eternal.
Pearce pressed on, navigating a section where all but one floorboard had been removed. There was a two-foot drop to the house’s outer aluminium shell, which was rotten in places.
‘It’s to stop the kids,’ a voice said, and Pearce looked up to see a man sitting on a stool in what might once have been a kitchen.
About six feet four, the man wore a WBC contender T-shirt and a pair of torn denim shorts. Pearce thought his remark was some kind of joke until he saw a toddler totter across the filthy hallway on the other side of the single-plank bridge. The boy’s long blond hair was matted, and he had the blank eyes of a child who’d lost hope. He wore a pair of Spider-Man briefs, which were yellowed and foul, and his ribs stuck out like hateful question marks.
‘Don’t mind him,’ the man said, unmoved by the child’s condition. ‘He knows better than to cross the bridge. Learn ’em the hard way, that’s what my pops always said.’
Pearce made it across the solitary plank and peered inside the room the toddler had entered. There were four other children, all wearing nothing but underwear, ranging from about one to about seven years old. They all had the same hollow expressions and were as filthy as the blond toddler.
‘Oh my god,’ Leila said through the concealed earpiece.
‘They yours?’ Pearce asked, trying to control his rising anger.
‘Uh-huh.’ The man nodded.
Pearce was close enough now to see his glazed eyes and smell the sour stench of cooked heroin.
‘Different moms, but I sired ’em,’ the man said. ‘Why? Ya wanna buy one?’
Pearce fixed the man with a furious stare that must have penetrated his stupor.
‘Just kidding, man. I love those younglings.’
Pearce had been abandoned by his parents, and couldn’t remember the love of a family, so he found it difficult to see children so casually neglected by blood. He swallowed his anger and remembered what he was there for. ‘You Otter?’ he asked.
The man stiffened slightly, as Pearce entered the room. All the units were gon
e. The walls were cracked and bare and there were no appliances, just a paper bag on the floor, the contents of which had spilled from a split in its side. There were tins of tuna and packets of ramen noodles. Pearce couldn’t see any taps or basins and when he looked at the table next to the man, he saw a half pack of noodles. They’d been eaten dry.
‘You a cop?’ the man asked.
‘Word is some people you work for came by some horse,’ Pearce said, looking pointedly at the burned spoon, foil and detritus that gave away what the man had been up to. ‘Word is you’re moving it for them.’
‘Moving?’ the man said. ‘Me? I can hardly move myself. Moving?’ he scoffed. ‘Get the blow, smoke the blow. Sellin’ don’t come into it.’
‘Are you Otter?’ Pearce asked again.
‘I’m Otter,’ another voice said, and Pearce turned to see a stocky man in a Chicago Bulls vest and boxer shorts, standing in the doorway of the room the toddler had emerged from. Otter held a huge revolver – it looked like a .44 – and had it trained on Pearce.
Chapter 59
‘Who the hell are you?’ Otter’s eyes weren’t glazed. They were hostile and sharp and his scarred face was twisted into a scowl. Pearce kicked himself for letting the man get the drop on him.
‘My name isn’t important,’ he said.
‘Don’t you come in my house tellin’ me what’s important,’ Otter responded. ‘Name!’
‘Amr,’ Pearce said. ‘I’ve been told you’re moving product.’
Otter said nothing.
‘I’m in the market.’
‘You ain’t in the market,’ Otter sneered. ‘I seen who’s out there. You’re runnin’ with the Salamovs. No one comes in my house—’
As he said the word ‘house’, Otter made the mistake of gesturing at their surroundings and the muzzle of the revolver veered away from Pearce for a moment. It was long enough. He drew his pistol and opened fire, catching Otter in the foot. A second slug shattered Otter’s gun hand and the revolver clattered to the floor.
