The Fifth Vial

by Michael Palmer

  After one more brief stop, fighting for air and trying to ignore the explosive pounding of her heart, Natalie found herself on level ground. A long, right bend in the road, and she was in front of the same hospital entrance where, just a day before, Ben had been shoved out to meet what seemed a certain death. Hands on knees, she allowed her breathing to deepen until finally, one sweet breath fought its way to the depths of her lung.

  Glancing around, she withdrew the gun from her backpack and began, warily, to circle the residence quarters, retracing roughly the route she had used to escape after her last visit. She stayed in the trees and gave the far end of the wing a wide berth.

  As she neared the broad patio and the swimming pool, she could tell almost instantly that Luis had succeeded in at least one phase of his mission. Three men were around the pool, all of them in swimsuits, all of them giggling. On the tables near them were bowls of some sort of stew.

  “…So then she brings the tray out, filled with like a ham and pork sampler, trips, and flips the whole frigging thing onto the rabbi’s lap.”

  The teller of the tale, a redhead in his late twenties, burst into uncontrollable laughter at his own humor, sloshing his drink onto his lap and making no attempt to blot it up.

  The flight crew, Natalie quickly deduced.

  One of the men—more mature-looking than the other two, and probably the captain—was on his hands and knees, violently vomiting into a low bush, while simultaneously continuing to laugh.

  “I don’t feel so good,” the third man kept saying over and over again. “I don’t feel so good….”

  There was no way Natalie could make it to the storage shed and the passage to the hospital without being seen by the trio. She lowered her backpack to the ground, then leveled her long-barreled revolver at the redhead.

  “Okay, on your bellies,” she snapped. “All of you.”

  The men, including the captain, glanced up at her, pointed, and howled. Natalie gave brief consideration to simply shooting each one of them in the leg, but knew she wasn’t capable of it unless there were no other options. Instead, she moved quickly to the redhead and whipped him across the back of the head with the muzzle, instantly opening an inch-and-a-half gash. The man cried out as he fell, facedown, onto the concrete, but then he began laughing again, mumbling, “Jeez, why’d you do that?”

  Natalie stared from one of the men to the others, wondering what her next move should be. Did they have weapons in their rooms? How long could she count on Tokima’s preparation lasting? There was no way Luis could control the amount of drug they each ingested. Were they all going to die from it?

  While she stood contemplating, the man who wasn’t feeling well rolled from his chaise and retched into the pool. Natalie had decided it was safe to leave them where they were when a woman wearing olive military fatigues burst from the shed, her semiautomatic machine gun ready. She was five feet at the most, with a pleasant, russet face and broad hips. Quickly, she took in the scene.

  “You are Natalie?” she asked in coarse Portuguese.

  “Rosa?”

  Luis’s girlfriend smiled and nodded.

  “We must tie them up,” she said, gesturing toward the rope and tape. “Luis says everyone gets tied up.”

  The two of them, with no fear of resistance from the men, quickly bound their ankles and taped their wrists behind their backs. The patio and pool were now awash with whatever had been inside their stomachs.

  The women wiped their hands on elegant beach towels, and hurried to the shed and down into the tunnel. In the dining room they found the kitchen help in one corner, bound and gagged in a way similar to the flight crew. Trussed up not far from the Brazilians, her glare threatening to burn a hole in Natalie’s chest, was a narrow-waisted white woman with short, dirty blond hair and a barbed-wire tattoo around her arm. Natalie gestured toward her, silently asking who she was, but Rosa could only shrug.

  It could be worse, Natalie wanted to say to the furious woman. You could have eaten lunch.

  “Do you know where Luis is?” Natalie asked as they moved cautiously, guns drawn, from the dining room and past the lounge where she had hidden behind the couch so close to Santoro and Barbosa.

  “He has been here,” Rosa whispered, risking a peek around the doorway of the first recovery room and then gesturing inside.

  Natalie flattened against the wall across from Rosa and looked inside the room. There on the floor, wide-eyed and trussed up in a manner that would have challenged Houdini, were a husky man and a silver-haired woman in scrubs. They were in obvious distress, due in large measure to the vomiting they were doing through their noses and around the duct tape pasted across their mouths. On the hospital bed beside them, blissfully unconscious and breathing with the help of a state-of-the-art ventilator, was a pretty, red-haired woman—Sandy.

  “I think we should leave her be like this for now,” Natalie said. “Do you agree?”

  Rosa nodded and started down the hallway. Natalie, anxious to get clear of the fetid air in the room, made some minor adjustments on the ventilator, and followed. Three from the kitchen, three from the plane, the woman who was probably Vincent’s girlfriend, and the two medical people—nine accounted for, but none of them a major source of danger. Those people were still out there someplace. Natalie caught up with Rosa by the main entrance. The corridor leading down to Dr. Donald Cho’s macabre treatment room was empty. The fact that the master of virtual reality and psychopharmacology had not been brought in for this case spoke frighteningly of Sandy’s fate. There would be no need for a DVD brainwashing her into believing a bogus reason for her surgery.

  Rosa stood beside the heavy glass double doors, put a finger to her lips, and motioned outside. There, facedown on the ground, was a red-skinned man in fatigues similar to Rosa’s. There was no blood about, and no obvious wound, but if he wasn’t dead, he was doing a praiseworthy imitation.

  “Salazar Bevelaqua,” Rosa whispered. “He beats his wife. Luis never liked him.”

  “You don’t have to remind me to stay on Luis’s good side,” Natalie replied.

  The odds were growing shorter. As near as Natalie could count, it was Rosa and she, plus Luis and one ally of his. Four. Against them were Santoro, Barbosa, and two remaining security men from the plane. Suddenly, the still afternoon air was pierced by volleys of gunfire. A man screamed out in pain. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the battle ended. From off to the right, they heard moaning, and a man swearing over and over again in English.

  Handgun ready, Natalie followed Rosa in that direction. At the edge of the building, sprawled on his back, peppered with bullets, was the man from Dom Angelo. Rosa hurried to him, cradled his head in her hand, then quickly turned to Natalie and shook her head grimly. Nearby, writhing on the ground, clutching his abdomen, his white turtleneck jersey saturated with blood, was another man—one of the security guards from the plane, Natalie reasoned.

  “Oh, God! Goddamn it!” he kept moaning. “Oh, please, help me.”

  Without a flicker of hesitation, Rosa stood and, from five feet, shot the man in the forehead. Natalie was no longer amazed at her own detachment and lack of emotion. The world of Whitestone Laboratories was a world of big money, of violence, and of death. She had been unwillingly drawn into it, and now she had adjusted.

  Sharing their unspoken concern for where Luis might be, and if he had been hurt, the two women inched their way back into the hospital and turned toward the portion of the main corridor that ended in Cho’s laboratory. Natalie stopped in front of the closed door to Santoro’s office and tried the knob. She was surprised to find it wasn’t locked, and had taken a single step into the room when the door was viciously slammed, and Barbosa’s powerful forearm slipped over her shoulder and tightened around her throat. He was nearly a full head taller than she was, with a bulging, rock-hard belly that pressed into her back. The hair on his arm was like sandpaper against her skin.

  “Drop it!” he hissed. “Drop t
he gun!”

  Gagging from the pressure across her trachea and larynx, Natalie immediately complied. Barbosa opened the door slowly and, using her as a shield, moved into the hallway and called out, “Drop it, Rosa! Drop it now or I will break her neck and kill you at the same time…. You know I can do it and you know I will. Good. Now, get on the ground. Facedown! Quickly.”

  Her lips drawn back in the snarl of a tiger, Rosa slowly did as the policeman insisted. At the instant she was prone, the outside door flew open and Luis lurched through. He was a disheveled apparition, wounded at least twice, once in the left shoulder and once in the chest on the right side. Blood, probably his and others’, was smeared across his face and the legs of his khakis. His right hand, clutching a pistol, dangled impotently at his side. Natalie sensed Barbosa smiling.

  “So, traitor,” he said, keeping his forearm tightly in place, “it is over for you. Drop the gun and lie down next to your woman, and I will have one of our surgeons see if they can save your life.”

  “That would be very kind of you, Oscar,” Luis said. “I know I can trust you to keep your word.”

  The warrior’s arm snapped up like a striking cobra—so fast that Natalie barely understood what was happening until it was over. Orange fire spit from the muzzle of his gun. At the same instant, Barbosa’s grip across her throat vanished. She dropped to one knee and whirled in time to see the policeman stumbling backward. His hand, blood oozing from beneath it, was pressed over where his right eye had been. His vast bulk slammed heavily against the wall by Santoro’s office door, then slid to the floor, macabrely held in a seated position by his massive girth.

  “I told you I was good at killing,” Luis rasped, before collapsing.

  Thirty-Seven

  Wealth and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book IV

  For a time, Ben sat there on the ground, leaning back against the Mercedes, sipping the last of what little water remained in the canteen. He felt feverish and weak. His shoulder was throbbing, and a pounding headache was evolving directly behind his eyes. Natalie had been right to leave him. He should have suggested doing so, himself. Now, here he was. He wondered what Alice Gustafson’s reaction would be to his predicament. She had risked her life a number of times to expose those trafficking in illegal organs, so maybe she wouldn’t think much of his putting his survival on the line when he drove through that gate to the Whitestone compound back in Texas. But then again, she probably would.

  Thanks to whoever had vandalized the car, the plan he, Natalie, and Luis had settled on had come apart almost before it had begun. It still seemed possible that Luis could get Tokima’s drug into the food at the hospital. It seemed possible that the guards and professional killers who were defending the place could be overcome. It seemed possible that Natalie could make it to the hospital in time to help, and that she could somehow get Sandy off the respirator, into someone’s car, and back up the hill to whisk him away.

  It all seemed possible, but not very likely.

  Ben pulled himself up and battled back the resultant dizziness and nausea. He had come too far merely to sit here and wait. Natalie had said that he might be of help if he could reach the village and contact the priest there. If he tried and instead ended up moldering on the roadside, at least he would have died knowing he had gone for it. At least he would have made his return to the earth having cared.

  As he pushed a step away from the car, his hand brushed across his pocket and the small revolver Luis had given him. He had actually forgotten that it was there. It was a .38—a snub-nosed Saturday night special, not unlike the gun still in the wheel well of Seth Stepanski’s Chrysler back in Fadiman.

  He took several more steps, then forced himself up straight and marched back to the road. The two classy women in his life, Alice and now Natalie, would be proud of his grit. So would Sandy if she ever knew. It was strange to think of her lying there medicated to unconsciousness in the hospital while so much turmoil swirled about, and all of it involving her.

  He turned away from the direction where he and Natalie had come, and headed toward the town. One step, then another. Head up, shoulders back, he tried to ignore the pain racking his body.

  Keep going…keep going

  Father forgive us for what we must do

  You forgive us, we’ll forgive you

  Holy Mary, mother of God…

  We’ll forgive each other till we both turn blue

  Pray for us sinners…

  The afternoon sun was intense now, and because of the hour, the rain forest road offered little shade. First John Prine, then the Hail Mary, then John again…line by line, verse by verse, Ben kept walking, stumbling from time to time, but never falling. He might have walked a mile or just a few hundred yards. He couldn’t tell and it really didn’t matter. The water was gone, and his hope of making it anyplace was dwindling. His head was down now, watching his boots inch forward one painful step after another. Then, a slight downward change in the road caused him to lift his head, and there below him was the town—a postcard photo of Lilliputian structures, nestled in a lush valley. He was nearly insane from the pain and the dizziness, but he had made it. His cracked lips pulled upward into a raw, defiant smile.

  He was still dragging more than walking when he reached the actual outskirts of the village. Curious eyes followed him as he made his way toward the center of town.

  “Agua, por favor,” he said to an old woman, using his feeble Spanish and hoping it bore some similarity to Portuguese. “¿Dónde está Padre Frank…a…Padre Francisco?”

  The wizened woman offered no water, but did gesture up the street to a quaint chapel. Down several of the streets, Ben saw vehicles of one kind or another. If anyone could borrow or rent or even commandeer one of them, it would have to be the village priest. What shade there had been on the road was gone now, and heat radiated like a kiln from the hard-baked clay. He shuffled forward, but sensed that he might crumple at any moment. The surroundings grew dim, and as he approached the church, he felt his legs beginning to go.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord…

  Bit by bit, life came back into focus. Ben’s first major reconnection to the world was that he was on a bed—clean linens, a pillow, no, two of them. The aroma of brewing coffee helped nudge his consciousness along.

  “So,” a man’s voice said in English, “my American patient awaketh.”

  “How do you know?” Ben asked.

  “You have been somewhat delirious for nearly half an hour. What you said made absolutely no sense, but being from Brooklyn, I know American when I hear it. Frank Nunes—Father Frank if you wish, Padre Francisco if you want to sound more exotic. You took some water—two glasses—just a little while ago. Would you like some more? Coffee?”

  Ben’s awareness returned with force. He pushed himself up and swung his feet over the bed, mindless of the cannon blasts between his eyes.

  “Listen, please, Father. I just came from Natalie Reyes, she said she—”

  “Ah, the missing vagabond. I helped her to a campsite, and then when I went to look in on her the next morning, she was gone.”

  “She’s at the hospital,” Ben said breathlessly. “There’s trouble there. Big trouble. I need your help.”

  “My help?”

  “There’s a woman who’s been flown in. I was on the plane. If we don’t get down there with a car, she will die—no, not just die, she will be murdered. I’ve got to get a car and I’ve got to get down there right away.”

  “Is Senhorita Reyes all right?”

  “I don’t know, Father, she—Listen, I really don’t have time to explain. This is an emergency. Natalie is in danger, so are some people from the village here. Luis—”

  “Luis Fernandes?”

  “I never knew his last name, but he’s trying to help us.”

  “Us?”

  “Nat
alie Reyes and—Please, you must believe me. People are going to die there. Maybe many people. If you can just get us a car, I can explain on the way. Maybe you can intervene. Maybe you can do something to—”

  He glanced over at the kitchen table across the room and noticed a set of car keys lying there. Father Frank followed his gaze.

  “My car is not very dependable,” he said.

  Ben was beginning to feel exasperated.

  “Let’s at least try it,” he begged. “Or…maybe one of the other ones in the village. Surely you—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Ben stood up.

  “Okay, if you can’t help me, I’ll find someone who can.”

  “Sit down,” Frank said sharply.

  “No! I need your car.”

  Ben reached for his revolver, but his pocket was empty.

  “That little thirty-eight was dangerous,” the priest said. “The barrel was filthy. No way to know for sure which way the bullet was going to go. Now a Glock is a different story altogether.” He withdrew a glistening pistol from beneath his robe and flicked the barrel in Ben’s general direction. “I polish this forty-five every Sunday, right after Mass. Parts of the rain forest can be quite wild and dangerous. There are times, even for a priest, when the shield of God may not be enough protection.”

  “You’re no priest!” Ben snapped.

  Furious and desperate enough to be mindless of the consequences of his action, he dove at the man. Father Frank parried his attack with little effort, throwing Ben back onto the bed.

  “Easy,” the priest said. “I have no desire to hurt you as I am, in fact, a man of the cloth—less pious than some, I would grant you, but far more pious than others. I just happen to believe that there is no great dignity or holiness in being poor. It is one of the few beliefs I do not hold in common with the Good Book. The people who run that hospital see to it that our church remains solvent and that I remain as dignified as possible.”