Michael Palmer

by The Last Surgeon

  Chilly waves crashed against the rocks at the base of the lighthouse. Taking advantage of a brief interlude between swells, Koller reached into his dry bag, resting atop the cockpit tray, to confirm its contents. The two tools he would need were stashed safely inside nylon drawstring bags—a small hammer and a syringe. The latter was kept safe in a protective plastic case, and filled with four hundred milligrams of succinylcholine, or “sux” as many anesthesiologists and emergency specialists referred to the magical drug. Koller removed the needle cap and tapped gently at the base of the syringe, encouraging a tiny crystal drop of death to bead out. He imagined the onset of the paralysis of Landrew’s muscles, especially the thick traps across the shoulder, and those chest muscles that were needed, along with the diaphragm, to breathe. A single shot of the massive dose he had chosen was all it would take to stop every muscle cold. Riding the swells, he rubbed his hands together vigorously, not so much to warm them, but to help contain his exuberance.

  Over the sound of wind and waves, Koller heard the classical music Landrew liked to play when he paddled. Mozart—always Mozart. Hidden from view behind the lighthouse, Koller gauged the distance. He waited until the anesthesiologist tapped his paddle against the granite boulders before slipping out through the fog like a mirage.

  “Hey there,” Koller called out.

  Slightly breathless from his effort, Landrew did a double take, then shut off Mozart.

  “I didn’t know anybody else was out here,” he said. “At this hour there seldom is. Where did you put in?”

  Koller paddled toward the man’s kayak, keeping the syringe tucked securely under his leg.

  “Just a bit south of Parker,” he said. “This is my first time out to the lighthouse. You?”

  “Parker. I drop in at Parker every day.”

  The doctor sounded curious, but not suspicious, Koller decided.

  “Couldn’t have picked a better morning, eh?” the killer replied with a chuckle.

  Drenched from ocean spray, Landrew’s silver hair escaped in spots from underneath his REI baseball cap. His distinguished good looks and best-that-money-could-buy gear were, Koller thought, a perfect compliment to his type A personality.

  “If you like fog, you’re certainly getting the most out of the experience,” Landrew said, sounding just a bit rushed.

  “I certainly am,” Koller agreed. “Mind if I anchor against your boat for just a moment? Mine’s pretty unsteady in these swells and I want to secure my dry bag.”

  “I . . . suppose so.”

  Okay, time’s up.

  Koller pulled his craft alongside Landrew’s, which was downwind and closer to the lighthouse. The mark, seeming slightly annoyed now, leaned over to help steady the other boat. Oh, how Koller loved it when his mark helped him to make the kill. The lighthouse, as he anticipated, shielded both men from the steady roll of waves, benefiting him with additional stability. The classic Three Dog Night song “Joy to the World” popped into his head and brought an audible chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?” Landrew asked.

  “This is,” Koller said.

  With serpentlike quickness, he tipped his kayak to starboard, giving him the additional inches he needed to reach the base of Landrew’s neck, focusing on a spot next to the spine. In virtually the same motion he drove the needle deep into the man’s trapezius muscle and depressed the plunger, dispensing the sux. He pushed a few feet away and watched with undisguised delight as the nature of the attack registered in his victim’s patrician face. Koller knew that beneath the man’s Patagonia jacket, Landrew’s muscles were already beginning to fasciculate—the individual fibers twitching and wriggling like so much spaghetti.

  “What’s wrong?” Koller asked with a grin. “Ocean beauty leave you breathless?”

  “Why?” the physician pleaded, fumbling with his paddle but getting nowhere.

  “You all ask that same question,” the master of the non-kill replied. “Why is that?”

  Then he laughed out loud.

  With the sux working its magic, Landrew was motionless inside his kayak. His eyes were alert, though frozen in a horrified stare.

  “Hey, fish got your tongue?” Koller asked, and laughed even louder.

  Landrew’s body, still upright, began gently moving from side to side, lolled by the waves passing beneath his craft.

  “Yes, that’s the effect of your old friend sux,” Koller said. “How many times in the OR have you used it on others? Hundreds? No, no, thousands. I’ll bet you can feel your heart racing in a desperate effort to get oxygen to your brain. Don’t bank on your brain winning that one.”

  Landrew’s eyes remained fixed. Koller paddled forward and gripped the gunwale of the man’s boat.

  “You’re a world-renowned anesthesiologist, Doctor,” Koller continued, “but I’ll bet I know succinylcholine as well as you do. Rapidly metabolized depolarizing neuromuscular blocker. Onset of action less than one minute. Half-life less than one minute. Breakdown product, succinic acid, won’t be looked for—especially not in a drowning victim. And yes, even if you can’t inhale, water will still get into your lungs passively, just from being submerged for an hour or so. So, who’s the expert? Ah, but there’s more.”

  Koller reached into his dry bag and took out the hammer.

  “I still needed to figure out how you were going to drown while wearing a life preserver,” he went on. “Want to guess how? Speechless? I understand. Okay, I’ll tell you, just like the police will tell the good widow Landrew. There was an accident, you see. A wave flipped your boat, or maybe you fainted from an irregular heart rhythm. Either way, you fell out of the kayak and tried your best to get back in. But then, gosh darnit, wouldn’t you know the kayak flipped over from a wave and the gunwale came snapping down onto your head. The blow knocked you unconscious. Floating facedown in the water, kept there by your life jacket, your lifeless body came to rest amidst those rocks over there.”

  Landrew’s eyes remained open, but Koller knew he was already dead. He removed the REI baseball cap and tapped the hammer against the man’s scalp until blood oozed out from a small gash. With his gloved hand, Koller rubbed blood from the wound against the gunwale of the corpse’s boat, augmenting the smear with strands of hair ripped from Landrew’s scalp. He then loosened the spray skirt before flipping the kayak over, spilling the lifeless body into the sea.

  “Nobody does it better,” Koller sang softly. “Makes you feel sad for the rest.”

  He watched until the current carried the body and boat against the boulders at the base of the lighthouse.

  Then, with several powerful strokes, he turned his kayak west and disappeared into the morning fog.

  “Nicely done,” he said to himself.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was lunch hour. A steady flow of employees poured out from the Veterans Administration Benefits building, off to grab something to eat. Reggie Smith watched them leave from his position behind a hot dog pushcart on the other side of Vermont Avenue. Strolling leisurely to the next streetlight, the gangly teen crossed the road, then waited until another group had exited before entering the building. Junie and Nick had dropped him off a block away and were waiting there in the car.

  The youth was only fourteen, and that worried his foster mother greatly, but he was physically ahead of the curve and had a survivor’s wiliness born of his disjointed upbringing and several stretches in juvenile detention. Barring anything unforeseen, he had assured her, he would be okay.

  Junie and Nick had misgivings.

  Reggie was five and already in foster care when his remarkable sense of computers began to manifest itself. Initially, he was deemed cute and precocious, but that was before age seven when he began charging video games and CDs to his foster parents, intercepting the shipments to the house, and storing the booty beneath the clothes in his bureau drawer. By age nine he had been caught hacking into the computer at school and changing grades. By eleven, when he moved in with Junie and Sam
, he had made another trip to juvenile detention for shoplifting and for frivolous, but disruptive, cyber crime.

  “Reggie has the potential to change the world . . . or to rule a cell block,” the judge had told his new foster parents.

  With the Wrights’ steadying hands on the tiller of his life, and Nick’s role as a big brother, the boy was headed in the right direction. Junie’s rationale in asking him to become involved in the search for Manny Ferris was that no one would be hurt, and someone they both loved would be helped. In all her years as a foster parent, caring for God only knew how many children, she had never used a kid or put one in harm’s way as she was doing with this boy. But Nick was increasingly desperate to find Manny Ferris, and Reggie Smith, with an IQ measured in the 150s, was no ordinary teenager.

  There was no metal detector. From yesterday’s visit to the building, Reggie knew the lunchtime crowd would distract the lone security guard, making it easier for him to pass by. He was dressed conservatively, in tan corduroy pants and a blue collared shirt, over which dangled a perfect replica of the building’s visitor badge.

  Skipping yesterday’s biology class, he had ridden into D.C. with Junie and spent several hours observing people and walking up and down the granite steps to the main doors. Using his cell phone camera, he snapped several quality shots of the building’s visitor badge. It took him half the night to tweak the forgery using Photoshop, but before first light he printed his masterwork, then had it laminated at a nearby Kinko’s. It was virtually indistinguishable from the badge he had photographed, right down to the slight color fade and scratches on the laminate.

  Perfectly calm, and relishing the chance for mischief, Reggie climbed the expansive steps and walked through the massive glass doors. Once inside the marble-tiled foyer, he marched purposefully, head held up, eyes solidly forward, toward the security desk. As he neared, he lifted his badge to eye level, then waved it in front of his body to attract the guard’s attention.

  “My dad forgot his briefcase in his office,” Reggie said, again mindful to maintain eye contact.

  Suspicion was his greatest adversary now, and to counter it, he made certain his voice did not waver in the slightest. This was the gamesmanship he missed most about his hacking days. Hacking into a computer was so much more than just writing code, but only people like him understood that. It was certainly possible to enter a system long distance, from his personal computer, but the direct route, working from a computer already in the system, was so much faster and more convenient. To avoid getting caught when taking the direct route often required serious acting skills. The guard kept his face virtually buried in The Examiner while holding a roast beef sandwich in one hand and a Diet Coke can in the other. He barely glanced up to check Reggie’s ID badge before waving him through.

  Reggie exited the main stairs at the second floor, taking quick inventory of the layout, which he had studied on two different Web sites. It was just what he expected to find. He didn’t anticipate having to search for long before finding a cubicle that suited his purposes.

  There were only a scattering of employees who hadn’t yet left for lunch. He had passed only half a dozen workstations before he found one with a yellow Post-it note taped to the side of the computer monitor. He checked inside the cubicle with the Post-it, looking for a jacket or anything that might suggest the usual occupant could be returning soon. Chances were that David Fulton, the name on the business card inserted in the plastic holder on the outside cubicle wall, was at lunch.

  Time to get started.

  Sitting down in Fulton’s desk chair, Reggie gave a quick flick of the computer mouse to power down the screen saver. The computer was locked, as Reggie knew it would be, and required the right username and password to unlock it. He simultaneously pressed the Control, Alt, and Delete keys on the keyboard to activate the security prompt.

  He couldn’t help but laugh a little when he pulled the Post-it note off of the side of the monitor. David Fulton had written “Pword” on the yellow square and then just underneath, the characters “ABC123abc.” Information technology departments that enforced top-notch security protocols were notorious for frequently mandated password changes. Often they made employees change their password every week or two. It was smart security, Reggie would agree, but it also made it difficult for workers to remember their passwords. Instead of dealing with a help desk to retrieve a forgotten password, the office drones, most of them dealing with nonclassified material, often simply wrote their passwords on a Post-it or slip of paper every time it changed.

  Taking advantage of the Post-it technique was one of the oldest and best hacker tricks for accessing secure systems. If the password wasn’t kept in plain sight on a Post-it note, chances were good that it could be found under the keyboard, or taped either to the side of a nearby filing cabinet or on the bottom of the upper desk drawer. Finding a valid password on his first attempt was a lucky break, but not an unexpected one. Still, Reggie’s pulse rose a notch. He had promised when he moved in with Junie and Sam that he would keep his skills under wraps, but using them was always going to be a rush.

  Next, the username.

  If the security was typical, Reggie knew, he would have three chances to get the right combination of username and password before the system would lock up and he would have to find another cubicle. He typed “David. Fulton” in the username field—a common naming convention adopted by many information technology departments to uniquely identify each employee—and then he entered the password “ABC123abc.” Bingo! It had taken less than five minutes from the moment he started his timer to access every system and file David Fulton’s security profile allowed.

  “I love it,” Reggie whispered.

  Seconds later, the teen had the VA intranet open and had clicked over to the bookmarked Veterans Information Search Web page. As Nick had instructed, he typed “Manuel Ferris” into the search field, then hit Return. Five matches instantly appeared on the screen, along with basic identifying information. Reggie downloaded each of the files onto his portable data storage USB key, which he had plugged into the back of Fulton’s computer. Whatever information Nick needed, Reggie felt confident, was either now on that key or simply didn’t exist.

  Reggie slipped the small plastic unit containing the stolen files into his front pants pocket. Then, his racing heart nearly stopped. From down the hallway he heard a loud conversation, two voices, maybe three, followed by a burst of laughter. He was certain somebody had said the name Dave. Chances were fifty-fifty it wasn’t David Fulton returning early from lunch, but if it was, Reggie’s explanation regarding his father’s briefcase would be of no help.

  Time to leave.

  He stepped outside the office with no more than a glance to his right, and proceeded to walk confidently away from the central staircase and what turned out to be two men in suits.

  Slowly . . . slowly . . .

  Somehow, he managed to resist the temptation to look back.

  “Hey!” Reggie heard one of the men shout. “Was that guy just in my cube? Hey you, stop!”

  Reggie had had enough close calls in his hacking life to know that sometimes the best option was not to try and talk his way out of a jam, but to run from it. With a sprinter’s acceleration, he raced down the seemingly endless corridor, headed for the lighted exit sign. The commotion and shouts of the two men in pursuit encouraged several employees to poke their heads through their doorways or above their cubicle walls like prairie dogs.

  Reggie risked a quick glance behind him to assess his advantage. The men trying to chase him down, both of them overweight and running in their suits, were not nearly as agile as he was in his loose-fitting corduroys and New Balance sneakers.

  He was turning back to gauge the remaining distance between him and the exit door when a blond woman in a jacket and gray skirt, oblivious to the chase, emerged from her cubicle and stepped directly into his path. Shifting his weight in time to avoid a full-force collision, Reggie cli
pped the woman, spinning her sideways and down to one knee. She screamed loudly as the papers she was carrying flew up against the ceiling and then rained down on her.

  “Sorry ’bout that, lady,” Reggie said. “You okay?”

  The blonde nodded, clearly confused by the collision and possibly the boy’s congeniality. The delay was costly, however. Reggie’s chances of making it to the exit without getting caught had all but vanished. Improvisation was often the hacker’s best friend, and even in the worst of situations, he had never been one to panic.

  Operating on instinct, he spun around to face the two men, who were now just a few cubicles away. Surprise was all he had. As he often did when playing tackle football in the yard with Nick, he dashed directly toward them. Their eyes widened.

  Two doorways were all that separated them now. Reggie, arms pounding, was at full speed. The men raised their arms like Nick would have done, either protecting themselves or readying to make a tackle. Reggie waited until the outstretched tips of one man’s fingers were almost to his chest before making his favorite move. Ducking and sidestepping simultaneously, he skidded to his right, shifting past David Fulton and his coworker. Instead of open lawn, though, he was looking at an empty cubicle. Moving instinctively, he leaped onto the desk. Then, grasping the top of the wall divider with both hands, he swung his legs around, vaulting himself up and over the divider and into the adjacent office.

  Neither of the men was inclined or able to duplicate his maneuver.

  “Help! . . . Stop him!” they hollered.

  Reggie, smiling now, had already reached the stairwell door from which he had entered the second floor. There might have been enough distance between him and the men to take the stairs, but instead he launched himself over the stairwell railing and dropped onto the stone landing below, crying out in pain as his ankle rolled beneath him. Limping, he reached the main foyer just as the two men were entering the stairwell.