The Poison Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  Kolstas scowled. Not for a second did he believe the demand for product was down. It was all too easy to believe the fucking Pakis were using his ships to transport more than they admitted. They . . .

  That sound again, this time definitely coming from the stairs behind the tapestry. Someone had found the passage from the taverna!

  Well, whoever he was, coming up those steps would be his greatest and last mistake. He reached under the desk to press a button.

  At that second, the tapestry was ripped loose. The door behind it was open, and Lang Reilly, Glock in hand, stood staring at Kolstas. And he didn’t look happy.

  Reilly, of course! Who else knew of the door behind the tapestry? And who other than a rash American would dare come here alone?

  Kolstas swallowed his surprise as he pushed his chair away from the wall to give Lang easier entry. “Well, well. Mr. Reilly. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Lang stepped into the room, his weapon pointed at Kolstas’s head. “Try guessing, Alex. Try remembering what I said would happen if you fucked with my family. Or you might guess I’m here to find out who paid you to try to snatch me.”

  The Greek raised both hands in mock surrender. “I never was much at guessing, but you try it: guess how many of my men are on their way up here right now. Answer: more than enough to make you regret you came back.”

  Lang pursed his lips, a man in thought. “Wrong answer. The correct number is zero.”

  For the first time there was a crack in Kolstas’s confident demeanor. “They should arrive any second, along with a business associate arriving at the airport. My man should be bringing him here any moment now.”

  Lang sat on the far corner of the desk, the Glock pointed so the Greek was looking down the barrel. “Try again. The button under your desk. In fact, just keep it pressed.”

  Kolstas was making no effort at calmness now. “What have you done with my men?”

  “Me? Nothing. Let’s say they are being otherwise entertained while you and I discuss business. Like, for instance, who paid you to have me kidnapped?”

  A shaky grin crept across Kolstas’s face. “You think I will tell you so you can then kill me? Really, Mr. Reilly . . .”

  Lang’s gun hand moved faster than Kolstas’s eyes could follow. The muzzle collided with his jaw with an audible crunch, the impact sending him sprawling onto the floor.

  Shaking his head, he ran a hand across his face, glumly looking at the red streak across his palm. A second later, he felt a surge of pain along with air along his teeth. Reilly’s blow had slit the cheek literally wide open.

  Lang slid off the desk. “I don’t get an answer, I promise you will be begging me to kill you.”

  Holding onto a corner of the desk, Kolstas struggled to his feet. “And if I tell you?”

  “I’ll forget the attempt at kidnapping. Believe me, it’s the best deal anyone is giving you today.”

  Kolstas’s mind was racing. How to tell this American something, anything, that would delay him until he could somehow summon help? Where were the Pakis who were supposed to be right outside the outside entrance?

  CHAPTER 52

  Yerkes National Primate Research Center

  201 Dowman Drive

  Emory University Campus

  Atlanta, Georgia

  At the Same Time

  Devina Shastri, Ph.D., smiled, white teeth bright against a mocha face as she peered through the bars of a cage from which a rhesus macaque monkey returned the look. “Birbal,” she said, reaching to unlatch the wire door, “come here so we may see if you are as healthy as you look.”

  It was strictly against the center’s policy to give the animals names. To do so was to potentially humanize them, perhaps clouding the researcher’s judgment. Officially the monkey was J-112-7, but when Devina selected him from the Research Center’s stock of test animals at its “Main Station” some 50 miles away, she had given him a name meaning Brave Heart in her native Hindi, appropriate for the pink-faced creature whose origins were also in northern India.

  Birbal was shy, cowering in the far corner of his cage. Small wonder. Contact with humans usually meant one of two things: feeding or something unpleasant like a series of shots, prodding and poking, or a rectal thermometer. He bared small but sharp teeth, screeching in his most threatening voice.

  “Come now, Birbal,” Devina cooed, “don’t be like that. I have a treat.”

  She produced an orange, Birbal’s favorite.

  Eyes as brown as hers narrowed slightly, an expression as skeptical of the offer as a voter of a politician’s promises.

  She rolled the fruit around the palm of her hand, a temptation.

  With a movement so quick it almost eluded the eye, Birbal snatched the orange and retreated to the limits of his cage where he began to peel it, his eyes still locked on hers.

  Devina sighed. “You really must learn to play fair, Birbal,” she scolded mildly. “You have your orange, but I still have my tasks to do.”

  If the monkey felt remorse, he didn’t show it. Instead, his teeth dug into the soft pulp as orange juice drizzled from his chin.

  His reaction was hardly surprising. It was a scene researcher and subject had played out before. Devina pulled up a tall stool that allowed her to watch as she consulted a thick file attached to a steel clipboard. She was not aware of the specific purpose of this experiment, but she was curious. Ordinarily, a series of tests on primates — rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, spider monkeys, sooty mangabey — would take years. This one was being rushed. Her only real clue was the fact that rhesus monkeys were usually used in testing serums once the product had passed what Devina called “the rat test.” Chimpanzees, as man’s closest relative, were favored for behavioral experiments and studies, the mangabeys for observing infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, and so on.

  Birbal had been on a toxic diet. Really toxic. Increasing amounts of various poisons: arsenic, strychnine, cyanide, even ricin had been mixed with his food along with the natural or herbal toxins, curare, mandrake, belladonna, henbane. At the moment, no ill effects had been noted, although the little monkey was getting enough of the stuff to kill an adult human. As if that wasn’t enough, the poor animal was injected weekly with venom from nearly every snake, lizard, or scorpion available. As far as Devina could tell, the only things missing were the marine animals, the lion or scorpion fish, sea snakes, or the delectable but potentially deadly fugu fish so popular among the Japanese.

  He also received a steady flow of other injections simply noted as X-421. As far as Devina could tell, nobody either at the Main Station or here on the Emory campus quarters of the Center knew what X-421 was. Only the prefix, the “X,” designated it as experimental. When she had mentioned her curiosity to Dr. Yancey, Chief of Practical Research, he had simply shrugged his shoulders and made a very pointed suggestion that a junior research assistant was wise not to ask questions the Center obviously did not want asked, much less answered.

  Birbal had finished his orange, pieces of peel littering his cage like an outbreak of spring flowers. This time he showed only token resistance as she lifted him from the cage and strapped him to the miniature examining table facedown. She placed a black bag beside him, the type doctors used for house calls in the days before medical insurance put a premium on the volume of patients seen and Medicare/Medicaid made health care a sacred right.

  A diminutive stethoscope told her the monkey’s heartbeat was normal. So was the pulse, blood pressure, and — through the hated thermometer — temperature. She drew a few centimeters of blood, although she was quite sure this would also produce results remarkable only in that they were normal.

  Exactly what was going on? Yerkes Primate Center was trying very hard to kill Birbal and not doing a very good job of it. His invulnerability surely had something to do with the mysterious X-421. But what?

  The obvious answer was that the Center, in conjunction with some bio lab, was working on an induced immunity to natura
l and chemical poisons.

  Four years of undergraduate study, five more to get a PhD in biochemistry, and two here at Yerkes, and she was working on something that potentially had military implications. She had made her position on such things quite clear before taking this job: wars would only cease when the military no longer existed. If one major power, the United States, for example, no longer had an army, there would be no need for, say, China, to suffer that expense, either. The savings could go to world hunger, a plague her native land knew all too well.

  Pacifism was a position she had thought Emory University embraced also. Over a thousand students had marched in protest at Fort Benning; the school gave a platform to a notoriously dove-ish former U.S. President, as incompetent as he was idealistic; the school paper excoriated the military with regularity; and only 9/11 had prompted the school to allow ROTC on campus after a 30-year absence.

  Birbal’s screeching shattered her indignation for the moment.

  She released him from the straps, taking a few minutes to bounce him in her arms as she would an infant.

  She would definitely have to speak to Dr. Yancey about this, seek his assurance that the project was for the common good, not for the military-industrial complex, which she regarded as a single entity, as evil and destructive as Lord Shiva’s consort Kali.

  Yes, she would speak to Dr. Yancey

  CHAPTER 53

  Trikoupi Street

  The answer to Kolstas’s last question was that his men were right where they were supposed to be. Three of the four, anyway. Perhaps not in the condition he might have preferred, but there nonetheless.

  Five or six minutes earlier, the big blonde had ground out her cigarette and was smiling enticingly to the shortest of the four men, a good three or four inches shorter than the blond. Iron filings to a magnet, he sauntered over with a sheepish grin on his face.

  Placing a hand on either side of his head and tilting his face upward as though to kiss him, she leaned forward. The others, snickering and making what were certainly lewd comments, came closer.

  Instead of a kiss, she stomped his foot, digging in one of the spike heels. Howling with pain, he bent down only to receive a blow on the back of the neck from clasped hands. As intended, it landed at the juncture of the cervical spine and the thoracic spine, delivered with the motion and intensity of a medieval headsman performing a public execution. A little harder blow from the hammer of those hands and the disks might well have separated along with the spinal cord. As it was, the victim’s knees bent, and he started what would have been a full face-plant on the sidewalk.

  Instead, her own knee caught the side of his head, delivering the coup de grace. Instead of his face, he went over backward, the rear of his skull thumping on the concrete sidewalk.

  Before he hit, his comrades overcame their astonishment enough to attempt to come to his aid. The first, a tall man missing a front tooth, grabbed the back of her blouse with one hand, the other drawn back in a fist.

  In addition to hands and feet, the human body has any number of weapon-grade angles and joints, which, if employed correctly, are just as destructive as, say, a fist to the face. The Agency’s physical training included the appropriate use of all of them.

  Had the woman’s present attacker, the one who grabbed the back of her blouse, known this, he might have chosen another stratagem. As it was, his reward for snatching the clothing from behind was the swift delivery of a well-aimed elbow into the right orbital rim, possibly fracturing its floor.

  Few things are more distracting to a belligerent than possibly being blinded by the shattering of an eye socket. He forgot the woman for the moment, dropping to his knees as his hands went to his face.

  Somewhere there was the sound of a cell phone ringing, or rather, buzzing. Under the circumstances, no one paid it a lot of attention despite its persistence.

  The two remaining men showed a great deal more caution than the first two. There was the snick of switchblades opening as a pair of six- to nine-inch blades reflected the afternoon sun.

  The woman showed more interest than fear as the two attempted to get her between them.

  The closest was making slashing movements as he closed in, the sure mark of the amateur. The movement takes the participant off-balance with each move, whereas a simple stabbing movement allows an immediate return to an even weight distribution and, if successful, is much more likely to produce a lethal result.

  It was a lesson the man closest to her was about to learn in the harshest terms.

  Crossing his chest with his right hand, the one with the knife, he sliced empty air where the woman’s throat had been milliseconds earlier. Before his swing reached its limit, she was inside the arc described by his arm. Both hands grabbed the wrist as her foot blocked his. Using his own momentum, she snatched the wrist downward, sending him airborne before she gave a final twist, turning the blade inward.

  Had he had time to think, he might have dropped the weapon. Instead, he conceded to the natural impulse to hold onto it. Consequently, his contact with the sidewalk ended with a grunt and spurt of blood as he literally fell on his own blade.

  The woman’s back was now to the wall as her gaze darted back and forth in search of the fourth man. The only evidence of his existence was the sound of rapid footsteps rounding the near corner in a speedy retreat.

  Two elderly women, each draped in a black shawl, stared at her, mouths, nearly devoid of teeth, agape. She smiled at them and they scurried away as though fearing she might turn her deadly attention to them next.

  She expelled a breath loudly before leaning over the two living, moaning men. She reached inside each jacket, extracting first a Glock, then a 9mm Beretta. She removed the magazine of each, jacked the chambered rounds onto the sidewalk to be followed by the weapons themselves. She then rolled the dead man over, extracting the switchblade. Holding the bloody thing between two fingers as she might hold the tail of a dead rat, she moved toward a doorway.

  She had guessed correctly. Although the four men had carried firearms, they chose to use silent if less deadly means instead. By the time they recognized a serious error in judgment, it was too late.

  She looked up and down the street. Although she would have bet that any number of eyes followed her every move from behind shuttered windows, the two old women, retreating at a surprising rapid pace, were the sidewalk’s only other occupants.

  Turning, she opened the door of number 37 Trikoupi Street and went inside, careful to turn the dead bolt behind her.

  CHAPTER 54

  Gurt reached the top of the third flight of stairs and opened an old-fashioned half-wood, half-opaque-glass door. She locked it behind her before taking in the scene in the office. An older man, Alex, she guessed, was unsuccessfully trying to staunch the blood from a wound that seemed to grin at her before she realized she was seeing teeth through an open cheek. He was trying to stand by holding the corner of a desk. His shirt, pants, and a good part of the rug beneath his feet were bathed in blood.

  Lang languished on the far corner of the desk, his Glock held almost casually, pointed at the other man.

  He nodded toward her. “That, Alex, my friend, is why your men weren’t here to help you.” He addressed Gurt. “Casualty count?”

  Gurt tried not to stare at the hideous grin the slashed cheek made. “One won’t be working for Alex again. Two might make it with medical attention, and the fourth is a, a schnelles Laufer?”

  “Er, fast runner, a sprinter,” Lang translated for Alex’s benefit. “Apparently one of your bodyguards chose to run rather than fight. Now, Alex, if you’ll give me the name of whoever hired you to kidnap . . .”

  Speaking with a cheek literally spilt open gave the Greek’s voice a wet lisp. “Reilly, I wouldn’t last long if I gave out that sort of information.”

  “What makes you think your prospects are any better right now?”

  Kolstas gave what might have been a snort of contempt. “You Americans have no stom
ach for killing in cold blood. You prosecute men who torture to get information from those who would destroy you and condemn your warriors who kill those who would kill them.”

  “The lady here isn’t American, and she has a real specialty with that knife.”

  The Greek looked at the blade Gurt still held. “To do what, cut off fingers?”

  Lang nodded to Gurt. “Actually, I had another appendage in mind.”

  Lang grabbed Kolstas from behind, locking his arms behind him. The target of Gurt’s gaze made him begin to struggle frantically. She deftly sidestepped a kick as she stepped inside his legs and unzipped his fly. She stretched his flaccid organ to its limit.

  “Not much of a loss, I’d say,” Lang offered. “But then, it’s not mine. Last chance, Alex. Oh, yeah, the balls come next. They go into your eye sockets while you choke on your own dick. Cute little trick I learned from the boys of al Qaeda.”

  The Greek’s face was shiny with sweat. He could not take his eyes away from the hand that held his most private part. “You win Reilly, you win. But you promise if I give you what you want, you’ll forgive me for trying to kidnap your son, right?”

  “You have my word.”

  Glaring at Gurt with icy hatred, Kolstas let go of the desk long enough to zip his pants. “There’s a man in the States, name of Grassley.”

  “Does Mr. Grassley have a first name? A place of employment perhaps?”

  “He owns, or operates, a drug company.”

  Lang and Gurt exchanged glances. “Drugs?” Lang asked. “You mean pharmaceuticals?”

  He nodded wearily. “Medicines, whatever the American word is. His company makes them. He asked me to find a place to test one of them some years ago. I didn’t hear from him again until a month or so ago. He wanted something you had and had a very good idea how to go about getting it. I’m pretty sure it was him.”