by Tom Clancy
Oh, yeah. Right. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in…
Lee’s ex-wife was originally from Florida, now a lawyer in Atlanta who also taught law at a local college. She and Lee had met in law school. Jay had checked her out, and while she was well-regarded as a teacher, she was also considered something of a radical. She was a member of the Lesbian Teacher Association or some such, big on women’s rights. A no-fault divorce, no hard feelings, at least not in any official records or interviews. Still, that must have made Lee feel weird. You get a divorce, your ex-wife switches her sexual preferences to the other side of the street. Might tend to make you doubt your masculinity a little.
George’s ex was a stockbroker. A law-school graduate who didn’t practice but who worked for one of the big trading companies on Wall Street, did well enough that she had a two-million-dollar condo overlooking Central Park, single, no significant boyfriends five years after the divorce, didn’t seem to date much, according to what Jay had uncovered about her. Like Lee with his ex-wife, George apparently got along famously with his ex.
We’re all very civilized here…
Thoughts, Jay, watch it!
Okay, okay! Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in…
Kind of made you wonder, though, how a woman who was rich enough to afford a condo that expensive didn’t have guys lined up waiting for her favor. Good-looking woman, hair cut short, built like a dancer.
Well, it didn’t really matter, did it?
Breathe out, breathe in, breathe out…
The next thought that swung down from the monkey tree and chittered at Jay so startled him that his eyes popped open, and he said, “Oh, shit!”
Sitting seiza on floor across from him, Saji came out of her own meditation. “What? The place on fire?”
“No, no, I just had a thought—”
“Don’t worry, it’s part of the process—”
“No, I mean, an idea. About the dope case!”
“Let it wait, it will keep.”
“No, it won’t. I have to get to my computer now!”
“Jay, this is not how to meditate.”
“I know, I know, but I have to check this out.”
Saji sighed. “Fine. Do what you have to do.” She closed her eyes and went back to her sitting. Jay was already up and hurrying from the bedroom to his terminal.
* * *
Michaels took the day off to be with Toni. She was still in bed, sleeping hard, and he planned to let her sleep as long as possible. The spotting the day before wasn’t a sign of fetal distress, the doctor had told them, but it had caused Michaels more than a little dry mouth and nervousness. By the time he had gotten to the clinic, Toni had already been examined, was getting some blood tests, and the doctor had pulled him aside to talk to him.
The doctor, a tall, very dark, and spindly gray-haired man of sixty or so with the unlikely name of Florid, was blunt: “Listen, Mr. Michaels, if your wife doesn’t sit down and prop her feet up and do a lot of nothing for the next four months, there is a chance she is going to have a preterm birth and lose this baby.”
“Jesus. Have you told her this?”
“I have. She’s still relatively young and healthy, and the baby seems fine, but her blood pressure is up a little. Normally she’s one twenty over seventy-four, but today she’s at one thirty over eighty-six. That’s not technically considered high, but we always watch that, especially in a primagravida… that’s a first-time pregnancy.”
“Why is that?”
“There is a condition called preeclampsia that happens in around five pregnancies out of a hundred. Usually it’s mild, and by itself it usually doesn’t cause problems, but sometimes it can cause what is known as abruptio placentae, which is a spontaneous separation of the placenta from the uterine wall, not a good thing. Usually this is in the third trimester, sometimes at delivery, and we can work around it, but it makes things hairy.
“Worse, sometimes preeclampsia can progress to full eclampsia, which, while very rare, involves seizures, coma, and sometimes, a fatal event.”
A fatal event.
Michaels swallowed. Now his mouth was really dry.
“Is this what’s happening to Toni?”
“Probably not. There isn’t any albumen in her urine, and she doesn’t have much edema, and usually you get those with the rise in BP, but better safe than sorry.”
“Toni is the toughest, strongest, healthiest woman I know.”
Dr. Florid smiled. “Yes, I expect she can bend steel in her bare hands. Normally, pregnancy is not a medical problem, women can go about their business and do everything they were doing before they got pregnant. Most women. But interior plumbing isn’t the same as voluntary muscles. No matter how strong-willed you might be, you can’t toughen up the inside of a uterus. Toni’s is fragile; likely she was born that way. Now, she could go on to deliver this baby without any more problems, but I’d be a lot happier and that would be a lot more likely if she took it easy. You need to impress on her how important it is for her to relax. After the baby comes, and assuming she has time, she can go swing on a vine like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and kick the crap out of lions and rhinos for all I care, but for now, no strenuous exercise. What I think is strenuous and what she thinks that means are probably different. I don’t want her doing any heavy lifting, jogging, horseback riding, or deep knee bends, and I don’t want her doing those martial art dances she can’t seem to live without. She can lie in bed. She can sit in a chair or on a couch, she can walk to the kitchen to take her vitamins, but that’s about it.”
Michaels nodded. “I understand.”
“If we have another epsisode of second-trimester bleeding, I am going to confine her to bed for the duration. I know she won’t like that.”
Michaels had to grin. “No, sir, that’s for sure.”
He had another question, started to speak, but decided that maybe it was selfish to ask it.
The doctor read his mind: “Sex is permissible, assuming you don’t like to pretend she’s a trampoline while you do it.”
Michaels flushed, embarrassed.
The doctor laughed. “Listen, I know this all sounds very dramatic and scary, but you need to remember that in medicine, we have to plan for the worst-case scenario. Chances are very good that nothing bad will happen to your wife or your unborn son. But we have to let you know the possibilites, no matter how small. We have to cover all the bases.”
“So you don’t get sued,” Michaels said.
“Hell, son, I could give my patients and their families movies, recordings, documents, a degree in medicine, and get ’em to sign a paper saying they understood them all and would never even talk to a lawyer in church, and we’d still wind up in court if anything went wrong. We always get sued when something goes wrong.”
“Must be awful.”
“Catching babies makes up for it. The look on the new mama’s face when she sees her child for the first time is priceless. Pure joy. Long as my malpractice insurance and my hands hold up, I’m going to keep doing it.”
He clapped Michaels on the shoulder. “What I personally think is that this pregnancy is going to do fine, if your wife will just kick back and let it roll along.”
“Thank you, sir,” Michaels said. “I appreciate it.”
Now, as Toni slept and Michaels puttered around the condo, he hoped the doctor had been right in his assessment. Toni wanted the baby, and he did, too. It was going to be the center of their new family and life together, and it would be devastating to lose it.
Him, not it.
In the living room, he came across the box with the two kerambit knives. He took them out, put one in each hand, got a feel for how they worked. Odd, to be playing with knives and thinking about a new baby.
Well, maybe not, given the boy’s parents.
He moved the knives slowly and carefully. It probably wouldn’t do Toni’s stress level any good at all for him to accidentally slice his wrist open. Not to mention his own h
ealth. Still, the little blades seemed familiar in his grip, comfortable, and the djuru moves didn’t seem to put him in any danger of cutting himself. At least not this slowly and carefully. One hurried wrong move could put the lie to that quick enough, though.
He put the knives up, and tiptoed back in to check on Toni.
26
Somewhere Over New Mexico
On the flight home, Drayne felt pretty good. The computer guy was as good as he’d been cracked up to be. The police in SoCal and Steve’s Gym no longer had any reference to one Robert Drayne in their systems. More, the techno-whiz was able to determine that they hadn’t gotten around to where his name had been to assign anybody to check it before it had magically vanished. Nor had it been printed out to a hardcopy. The list had been renumbered, and unless you knew somebody had been erased and knew precisely where to look and how to look, you wouldn’t be able to tell it had been done. And even if you could tell that, you wouldn’t know who was gone.
Once again, Drayne was golden. And all it had cost was a promise of free dope as long as the guy lived. Cheap beyond measure, even if he had to pay it.
Drayne smiled as the flight attendant walked along the first class rows, asking if anybody wanted complimentary champagne. Probably the stuff was Korbel, or at best one of the California domaines owned by the French. Not bad if you had no experience with the really good stuff, but as far as Drayne was concerned, he wouldn’t use it to clean the chrome on his car bumper. Still, the attendant was a babe, not wearing a wedding ring, and the flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to LAX was still hours out from landing. He could strike up a conversation with her, maybe get her number. Say, have you ever considered acting? You have great bone structure….
The attendant stopped to talk to a woman Drayne thought he recognized as somebody in L.A. politics, a city council member or maybe a spokesperson for the mayor’s office. Drayne glanced at his watch.
About now, Tad would be buying the computer whiz a dinner at a great little out-of-the-way Italian restaurant locally famous for its fresh produce, ostensibly to make arrangements to deliver a dozen caps of the Hammer as a first payment of a lifetime drug supply. The computer geek, a health nut, had raved about the place. The salad that came with the meal featured fresh wild greens, mushrooms, and other local herbs, and was terrific, he’d said.
Drayne had smiled, regretting that he had to be back in L.A. and would have to miss that, but hey, Tad loved salad!
The last time Tad had eaten a salad or anything remotely healthy had probably been twenty years past. Anybody who looked at him could see that. But a guy as full of himself as Mr. Computer Wizard would skate right past that obvious fact without blinking. People saw what they wanted to see, not what was really there.
So the guy had chosen his own exit and made it easy for them to hold the door open.
If everything went as planned, just as the computer geek was about to lay into this garden delight, he was going to get a call on his com. Tad had the number programmed into his own com, and a touch of a button would do the trick. While Mr. Wizard was distracted, Tad was going to add a couple of different kinds of sliced mushrooms to the man’s salad that weren’t on the menu. These grew wild in places as hot and damp as Austin still was this time of year, easy to find if you knew where to look, and once they were sliced were virtually identical to any other small, white-fleshed mushrooms.
The first variety of these particular’shrooms contained heavy concentrations of amatoxins and phallotoxins, either of which could be fatal, and both of which would almost certainly destroy liver and kidney functions, leading to death within a week to ten days 80 percent of the time.
The second variety was chock-full of Gyromita toxins, which, while not quite as nasty as the others, also attacked the liver and kidneys, plus the circulatory system, leading to heart failure in extreme cases. Mostly Gyromita poisoning was uncommon in the U.S. because cooking these mushrooms usually mitigated the toxin. Nice, crisp, raw ones in a salad would still pack a nasty punch, however.
Mr. Computer Wizard would enjoy his meal. He and Tad would part company on the best of terms. A day later, maybe two, Mr. Wizard would come down with flulike symptoms: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cramps. His doctor would probably miss the diagnosis at first, but even if he didn’t, the only way to keep the victim alive would be a liver and maybe a kidney transplant, and even then, the heart was still at risk.
No guarantee, of course, but eight chances out of ten he would croak weren’t bad odds. And if he made it, he’d be a long time recovering, on immunosuppressive drugs if they could find him a new liver, and unable to screw with his body chemistry if he wanted to stay alive. And if he made it that far? Well, they could always pay him another visit.
If he died, it would be due to mushroom poisoning, a terrible tragedy, a freak accident. Bad for the restaurant’s reputation and insurance carrier, but, hey, that was how life went sometimes. You want an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs.
The flight attendant approached. “Care for champagne, sir?”
“That would be nice. Look, I don’t want you to think I’m hitting on you, but I’m a movie producer. Have you ever considered acting?”
He held up his producer business card and smiled.
She took the card, looked at it, and smiled back. “I’ve thought about it. I was the lead in my high school play.”
Life was very good.
* * *
Life is crappy, Toni thought. Nobody had told her what might happen when she got pregnant, nobody had said she’d be reduced to the mobility and muscularity of a slug. She hated this.
Alex had hung around to take care of her, but she had made him leave. He was sweet, but she wasn’t going to be pleasant company, and she didn’t want him thinking of her as a constant bitch. Better he should see her smiling and at least offering some pretense of being happy once in a while.
“You sure?” he’d asked, after three exchanges on the subject.
“I’m positive. Go.”
And he had, and that pissed her off, too. Yes, she had said for him to, she had insisted that he do so, but she hadn’t really wanted him to leave. Why didn’t he know that? How could he just… take her at her word that way? Why were men so stupid?
Yes, yes, all right, she knew it was illogical, but that was how she felt.
Now that Alex was gone, she was at a loss for what to do with herself. The doctor had made it crystal clear she was on light duty from now on, and since a big part of her had always been physical, this was proving to be intolerable. She couldn’t move, she might as well put down roots and turn into a fucking houseplant. She really hated this.
She didn’t feel like sitting at the scrimshaw project. She didn’t feel like watching television or listening to music or reading. What she felt like doing was going for a five-mile run to clear her mind. Or a half hour of stretching and then silat practice. Or anything requiring sweat and sore muscles.
No point in even bothering to think about such things. It would only make her feel worse, if that was possible.
Other women must have gone through this. She could do it if anybody else could, she kept telling herself. But that didn’t help.
The house was clean. She had spent way too much time doing that lately, wiping counters, sweeping floors, rearranging shelves. You could eat off the floor — if you were allowed to bend over and take the risk.
She wandered into the bedroom. The bed was made. The bathroom was clean. Nothing.
The floor in Alex’s closet by his shoe rack had some clothes piled up to be dry-cleaned. Well, she could do that. Surprise Alex, given as how she didn’t usually fool with his chores.
She picked up a suit, a sports jacket, a couple of good silk shirts, a few ties. The laundry-to-go basket was in the garage, where Alex would usually notice it when it got full, toss the dirty clothes into his car, and drop it off at the Martinizing place run by a family of Koreans on the way to work.
As she starte
d dropping the clothes into the hamper, she automatically went through the pockets. Being raised in a family full of brothers had taught her that when doing the wash. Boys left all kinds of crap in their pockets, and a handful of coins clattering in the washer or dryer would drive you nuts, not to mention chipping the inside of the machines. Ink pens could ruin a load of whites, and it was no fun picking lint from a washed, shredded, and dried paper napkin from a load of dark shirts, either.
In the suit trousers, Toni found a paper clip box, and inside that, the capsule.
She knew what it was from Alex’s description, it being big and purple and all, and it puzzled her as to why it was in his pocket. But maybe it was important. She seemed to recall the stuff had some kind of timing chemical in it, and it would be inert after a day or so. Alex hadn’t worn this suit yesterday, had he?
She reached for the phone on the workbench, looking at the capsule. She put it down next to the scrimshaw piece she’d been working on as Alex’s com bleeped.
“Hey, babe, what’s up? You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was taking your dry cleaning out to the hamper—”
“You were what?”
“Don’t sound so amazed.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Anyway, I found this purple capsule in your pocket.”
“Ah, damn. I keep forgetting about that. I was going to take it by the FBI lab and have somebody look at it. That’s the one John got on the raid I told you about.”
“I can do that for you, run it by the lab.”
“No, you can’t. You aren’t supposed to be driving, remember? Hang on to it for me, I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Fine.”
“Uh, thanks for calling me about it.”
“You at work yet?”
“Almost there.”
“I’ll see you later,” she said.
After she broke the connection, Toni stared into space. She sure hoped this baby was worth all this crap. He’d better be.
She wandered back into the house. All of a sudden, she was tired. Maybe she would lie down and take a short nap. Might as well. She couldn’t do anything else.
