The Fifth Vial

by Michael Palmer

  “And all you have to do is keep these people in line.”

  “That and to let the powers at the hospital know when nosy strangers driving cars that aren’t theirs come wandering into town with pristine boots, pretending to be hiking the rain forest.”

  “It was you who wrecked the car, wasn’t it?”

  “I do what I am told. Mercedeses don’t hold up that well here in the rain forest anyhow.”

  “So, here we have a priest who carries a gun, vandalizes cars, preaches to people he considers too poor for dignity, and supports himself and his church by taking money from murderers. Aren’t you something. Makes me really proud I’m a Catholic.”

  “Xavier Santoro is no murderer. Nor, for that matter, are any of the others associated with the hospital. Mr. Callahan, so-called illicit organ traffic takes place all over the world. Money changes hands and kidneys and other organs change bodies. What can be wrong with that? One person benefits in one fashion, the other benefits in another. In fact, in my opinion, there is no reason for such exchanges to be illegal or to consider them immoral.”

  Stunned, Ben stared at the priest, trying to see whether or not the man believed what he had just said. Then he remembered saying almost the same thing to Alice not that long ago.

  “Frank,” he asked, regaining some composure, “do you know who that woman Natalie is or why she’s here?”

  “Aside from the fact that she’s searching for a relative, and posing to be someone she is not, no. I know nothing about her.”

  “Put the gun down, Father. I’m not going to try and leave…. Thank you. Now, I have just one more question for you, and then I’ll do whatever you say, and tell you anything you wish to know.”

  “And what is that question, Mr. Callahan?”

  “Padre Francisco, do you know what really goes on at that hospital?”

  Thirty-Eight

  In what manner does tyranny arise?—That it has a democratic origin is evident.

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book VIII

  The dining room was like a mash unit. Rosa and Natalie had moved the tables and chairs to one side, and had dragged their captives to the area of the lounge where a makeshift enclosure of sofas, easy chairs, and dining tables turned on edge kept them all in view. For the time being, the jet crew had been left by the swimming pool, but the rest of the hospital workers and what remained of the security staff were all present and accounted for.

  Luis, though badly wounded, had been able to direct Natalie to the virtual reality laboratory at the end of the hall, where she found Xavier Santoro and a guard from the plane. Dapper, urbane Santoro had been violently ill, and now was cringing in one corner, swatting at the products of his hallucinations. Still, he was managing periods of lucidity, during which he kept telling Natalie that she was making a terrible mistake.

  Not far away from the surgeon was a strapping young man with his gun in his hand, too disoriented even to function. Natalie relieved him of the pistol without a struggle and then helped him shuffle down the corridor to Rosa, before bringing a wheelchair back to transport Santoro. Vincent’s surly girlfriend, who initially seemed to be the only one unaffected by the stew, had suddenly gotten sick and begun also to show other signs of toxicity. Luis and his medicine woman had done their jobs well.

  In spite of their triumph, Natalie and Rosa were grim. Luis, stretched out on one of the sofas, was in trouble. Natalie had tended to his wounds as best she could and had begun an IV infusion of saline to keep his sagging blood pressure from dropping to critical levels, but there was no question he was bleeding internally—possibly from a laceration to his liver.

  The mission now was to stabilize him as quickly as possible, wake Sandy, and get the two of them off to a hospital, stopping along the way for Ben. Natalie had seen two cars—sub-compacts—parked by the rear of the hospital. They might need them both to transport the five of them, and they would need them quickly. Somewhere out there, people were on their way—at the very least, nurses from Rio, one or more surgeons, and a patient in need of Sandy’s heart.

  “Luis,” Natalie said after getting a blood pressure reading in the low eighties, “for the time being, I should move you into the room where there is a heart monitor.”

  The warrior shook his head and lifted the pistol he had tucked beneath him.

  “Others are coming,” he said. “We must get away or we must be ready.”

  “We have come this far, Luis. We will make it, but only so long as you are there to save our lives if we get in trouble again. You are my hero, and I have been so busy with everything, I have not thanked you.”

  She turned to Rosa, pointed to her own lips, and then gestured to Luis’s. The woman grinned and nodded her permission.

  “Thank you, Luis,” Natalie whispered, kissing him lightly on the cheek, then the lips. “Thank you for saving my life.”

  Luis managed a weak grin.

  “It was nothing,” he said. “In dangerous situations like this, there is often only one chance. I had to take it.”

  “The shot that finished Barbosa was amazing. You didn’t even seem to aim. I think I felt the wind of the bullet as it went past my head.”

  “It was a lucky shot,” he replied. “If I had hit you, I would have just pulled the trigger again.” He punctuated the remark with a wink.

  Leaving Rosa to guard their prisoners, Natalie went in to wake up Sandy. In fact, the morphine infusion had run dry, and the woman, already much more conscious, was actually beginning to fight the ventilator.

  “Sandy, easy does it,” Natalie urged softly, stroking her forehead. “Easy does it. Sandy, squeeze my hand if you understand me…. Come on, squeeze my hand…. Good. That’s it. That’s it. Sandy, my name is Natalie. I’m a medical student from Boston and I’m here to help you. Everything is okay. Squeeze if you understand….”

  It took just a few minutes for Sandy Macfarlane to wake up enough to have the breathing tube removed. She was hoarse, disoriented, and near hysteria, muttering about her son in Tennessee and also someone named Rudy, but to her credit, she was able to listen to Natalie’s explanations and gradually to cooperate enough to roll onto a stretcher.

  Natalie wheeled her to the dining room. There was little change in those poisoned. Most of them were still trying to cope with the effects and side effects of the hallucinogen. One of them, the husky man in surgical scrubs, either an anesthesiologist or possibly a surgical assistant, was tucked on his side in a fetal position, not moving and, on closer examination, not breathing. Exhausted and desperate to do something about transportation, Natalie was able to summon little more than a brief pang for the man.

  She hurried over and knelt on one knee by Santoro, whose color was a ghastly gray-green.

  “Santoro, I need a car or a van. What do you have?”

  “I have nothing for you. You are making a mistake, a terrible mistake.”

  With no time to argue, Natalie forced the muzzle of Vargas’s heavy pistol into the surgeon’s groin.

  “You might not remember me,” she said in English, “but I hope you do. Two months ago, you and your friend Dr. Cho helped steal one of my lungs. You caused me great pain and ruined my life and I will have no problem at all in doing the same to you.” For emphasis, she jammed the pistol in even harder. “I’m going to count to five. If you haven’t told me where I can find the keys to at least two cars or a van, I’m going to pull this trigger and blow whatever is there between your legs to bits. And you know what? I’ll be happy to do it. Maybe you can become the first one on your block to have your privates replaced with a transplant.”

  “No, wait! Help me, I’m sick, I—”

  “Five…four…three…two…”

  “Wait, my desk, my desk. The keys to the hospital van are in the top drawer of my desk.”

  “Van? I didn’t see a van, just two small—”

  “It’s on the other side of the hospital. Down that way. Now help me, I’m going to be sick to my stomach again.”


  Ignoring him, Natalie raced to the office and located the keys, then hurried back to where Luis lay. His pressure was still in the low eighties and his color was poor. She was certain that he was in pain from his wounds—he had to be. Still, he gave no outward sign of it.

  “Luis, we’re ready to go. I’ve got the keys to Santoro’s van. There should be room for all five of us.”

  “I do not think so,” he said. “Leave me and Rosa. We have friends in the town. We can take care of ourselves.”

  “Absolutely not. We need to get you to a hospital. Ben, too.”

  Luis did not reply. Instead, he put his finger to his lips and pointed in the direction of the landing strip.

  “A helicopter,” he said. “It just landed.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “It probably came in downwind.”

  Natalie motioned Rosa over.

  “Rosa,” she whispered, “Luis says he heard a helicopter fly in and land. Did you hear anything?”

  “No,” Rosa said, “but believe me, if he heard something, it is there.”

  “Maybe we can force the pilot to help us take Luis and Ben to Rio.”

  “Let me go and check,” Rosa said, changing the ammunition clip in her gun. “I will go out the back past the pool, and then move into the forest.”

  “Just be careful.”

  There was no time for Rosa to heed Natalie’s warning. Her gun ready, she cautiously opened the door to the pool and patio. Before she had taken a full step outside, there was a burst of machine-gun fire, which nearly cut her in two, and drove her several feet back into the dining room before she dropped, lifeless, to the floor.

  Natalie had taken no more than two steps toward her when two swarthy men in commando garb and Arab headdresses charged into the room, then two more. In seconds, moving with extreme precision, they stationed themselves strategically around the room, guns ready. One of them flicked his automatic weapon at Natalie, and issued a sharp order in Arabic. Natalie opened her hand and let her gun drop. Then she raised both hands and kept them up.

  The soldiers scanned the room, looking for anything threatening, passing over Rosa’s crumpled, bloodied corpse as if she weren’t there. Then one of them marched back through the door. Half a minute later, he returned leading a man in an elegant robe and headdress.

  Was this the patient ticketed to receive Sandy’s heart?

  Natalie felt as sick as any of those who had ingested Tokima’s toxin. The four of them—Ben, Rosa, Luis, and herself—had tried the impossible, and only moments ago it seemed as if they had succeeded. Now, Rosa was dead, Ben was sick, Luis was gravely wounded, and she was standing helpless in the face of a team of professional soldiers. They had tried, they had lost.

  “Please,” she shouted across the room at the latest arrival, “please listen to me! Do you know what’s going on here?” The man, taller than the others, and imperious in his manner and bearing, stared at her blankly. “Do you speak English?” she persisted. “Portuguese? I want someone who speaks English or Portuguese.”

  “Then you are in luck, Ms. Reyes, because I am fluent in both.”

  With those words, her mentor, Doug Berenger, strode through the door and into the room.

  Thirty-Nine

  When he obtains the power, he immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be.

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book II

  The moment Natalie saw Berenger, the missing pieces of her life began flying into place. Instantly consumed by a hatred more powerful than any passion she had ever known, she slowly lowered her hands and stood, arms folded, watching as he impassively surveyed the carnage and illness surrounding them. Then he turned to her.

  “Our friend in the village, Father Francisco, radioed our friend Sergeant Barbosa here at the hospital that a beautiful, sexy tree-hugger with clean, new boots had made it out to Dom Angelo. When I heard Barbosa’s description of the woman, I had a funny feeling that it might be you. You are to be commended for making it this far.”

  “Go to hell, Doug,” she said, barely able to keep herself from leaping at him in an effort to claw his eyes out before the Arab soldiers cut her down. “You’re a goddamn murderer—a killer.”

  Her mind was racing. Over their years together as mentor and pupil, then as friends, she had developed a strong sense of the man. Now, she struggled to integrate what she knew of him with his involvement in this place. There was little chance, she reasoned, that she was going to survive—no, she immediately corrected, there was no chance at all. But somehow she had to get at him. Somehow she had to take advantage of his arrogance, his love of power, and his enormous ego. Somehow she had to rattle him—ridicule and goad him into making a mistake. No matter what, she was not going to die passively.

  “George Washington killed for a cause,” he was saying. “So did Eisenhower, and Truman, and Moses, and Mandela, and Simón Bolívar. And Lincoln sanctioned the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the cause of what was right.”

  “Oh, please, spare me your feeble justifications for being an amoral monster.”

  The surgeon’s eyes flashed, and she knew that she had stung him. It wouldn’t be the last time, she vowed.

  Berenger turned from her to the director of the hospital.

  “Santoro, where’s Oscar?”

  “My stomach. I’m sick…so sick.”

  The surgeon began sputtering and coughing up bile and acid.

  “Damn it, Xavier, where is he?”

  “Don’t…know.”

  “He’s dead,” Natalie said matter-of-factly. “I shot him. Right here.” She pointed to her eye. “He was a pig and a murderer, just like you.”

  “And you, my dear lady, are an irritating, self-serving little bug, a gnat, aptly named and certainly not deserving of the status of a Guardian.”

  “Not deserving of what?”

  “Tell me what you poisoned these people with.”

  “I don’t know. A little shaman I met in the forest put together a special something for me.” She glanced around the room. “He should have listened to me, though. I told him to make it a lot stronger.”

  Berenger crossed to where the silver-haired woman lay moaning and clutching her middle. He glanced down with some disgust at the body lying next to her and then carefully stepped around it.

  “Dorothy,” he said without a word of sympathy for her condition, “can you work?”

  “I…I can’t stop getting sick,” she managed. “It feels like my stomach is about to tear in two. It was something in the food at lunch. I’m sure of it. I’ve been hallucinating, too. Poor Tony couldn’t stop throwing up, either. How’s he doing?”

  “Not so well. Dorothy, I need you. I was counting on you to do the anesthesia for both cases. Is that the woman over there?”

  At Berenger’s gesture in her direction, Sandy began to shriek hysterically.

  “No! Please no! I have a little boy. He needs me. Please! I beg you. Don’t hurt me!”

  “Oh, that’s just sweet, Doug,” Natalie said. “She has a little boy. Aren’t you proud of yourself?”

  “Shut up!”

  Berenger quickly whispered something to the man in the regal robe, who then nodded in the direction of two of his men, and issued a quick order. With Sandy continuing to scream piteously, the soldiers wheeled her away and into the farthest operating room. In moments, there was silence.

  With Berenger’s help, the anesthesiologist managed to get to her feet. There was no way to keep her from seeing Tony’s corpse.

  “Oh, dear,” she gasped. “Poor man.”

  “Dorothy, listen,” Berenger said, “we’ll take care of Tony’s family. Real good care. Now, you’ve got to pull yourself together. The prince will be here any minute. He’s gone into congestive heart failure and may be in early cardiogenic shock. We need to move quickly, and to do that, we need you. When this is over, when you have helped give one of the most enlightened and powerful rulers in the world back his life, you will nev
er have to work again if you don’t want to. You will live in luxury for the rest of your days. Can you do it?”

  “I…I can try.”

  As the woman headed unsteadily out of the dining room, holding her midsection and shaking her head as if trying to clear it, Natalie noticed that Luis, white as a sheet, had shifted position and was working his hand underneath himself toward his gun. She shook her head in sharp warning, but he either did not notice, or else did not care.

  “So,” Natalie said, anxious to distract her mentor, “the paper I was supposed to deliver, the international transplant meeting—it was all calculated to get me down here.”

  “If there wasn’t a meeting here, I modestly admit I would have found another way. You see, it wasn’t mere chance and a passion for long-legged track stars that led me to connect with you when you were at Harvard. It was—”

  “Let me guess. It was a blood test that was drawn on me at a Whitestone lab. A green-top tube, to be specific.”

  Berenger looked genuinely surprised.

  “It appears that when the procedures here are concluded, you and I will have to have a little discussion as to who knows what about green-top tubes.”

  “I know that you are a murderer—a serial killer, no better than any of the rest of them.”

  “Think what you wish,” Berenger said. “We prefer to think of ourselves as involved physicians who are righting a serious wrong in the system.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “You were a twelve-out-of-twelve tissue match with a person we knew would one day need a new lung—a person whose work is about to revolutionize medicine as we know it. Twelve out of twelve, Natalie. That means almost no nasty antirejection drugs to slow him down. All mankind will be the richer for his work. Without your lung he well might have died.”

  “So you took me out to lunch and acted as if you actually cared about me.”

  “We needed to keep you on a fairly short leash. I ask you, who deserves that lung of yours more, you or him?”