Dr. O

by Robert W. Walker

  "Muro, we could make contact with Thorpe now. Let her know we've located the bodies."

  "No," she replied sharply.

  "What?"

  Riley nodded, agreeing with Robyn and saying, "Sergeant Muro's right, doctor."

  "But she has a right to know."

  "If we make any contact whatever, it'll tip Ovierto off to our whereabouts. It can only add ammunition to his camp."

  "Besides," added Riley firmly, "it'd just take the edge off Thorpe; ultimately make her more vulnerable than she already is, and knowing her she'd want to go through with it."

  "She wants Ovierto at any cost," said Robyn.

  "You're sure, are you?" asked Boas.

  "Yes, very sure."

  "And you're sure about this?" Boas asked, pointing to the bottom of the cold container. "Why not fill it with sand? We monitor its movement from here, and that way—"

  "All of that has been tried before with this guy," she said. "Tell him, Riley!"

  "I'm going in with Muro," he replied. "And we do the sting as planned. No shadows, no electronic devices."

  "Ovierto's known for detecting electronics and he'll spot a decoy operative a mile away. I don't want anyone out at the locks," said Riley sternly. "Do you men hear that? Everyone sits it out."

  Boas looked from Riley to Robyn Muro, frowning and saying, "This is it then."

  "The moment the crate is called for."

  "You know that he has some nasty aim in mind, you realize, to destroy Donna Thorpe completely," said Boas. "You realize, don't you, that he has sure plans for this crate."

  "That's why we plan to take precautions," said Riley, lifting a crowbar.

  "That will be difficult to wield from inside."

  "We've calculated the risks, doctor," said Robyn.

  "Have you? Have you, really? Using an experimental drug, fighting back temperatures below freezing in order to surprise a madman... The whole idea is mad. Even if you survive the hour and a half to the border, we don't know if you will be in any condition to hold a gun, let alone pull a trigger. At least allow us to cut the freon lines early enough to-"

  "No, no! If the box is dripping water, he'll know something is wrong!" she shouted. "We go as planned."

  "Well, Riley, I see there's no hope of your talking sense into her."

  Paul Riley looked at his new partner and said with a smirk, "No... no, there isn't."

  "We're going to put this bastard away, Doc."

  "Make a great retirement gift for me," he replied. "It's just that the alternative... well, I don't wish to think of it."

  "Then don't. Just be ready with that juice of yours."

  "The Benz-PW6, yes. Fortunately —or unfortunately—I brought enough."

  Dr. Samuel Boas' gaunt, tall frame stood over Muro and Riley, staring down at them, wondering if they could see him with their four opened eyes staring back like the eyes of a pair of mannequins. Yes, Sam Boas thought now, they'd gone into the preliminary stages of unconsciousness; hopefully the injection had done its work. The pair were in wet suits at the bottom of the cold container, like a pair of frozen children. He wondered which was more dangerous, Ovierto or the tricky experimental drug. In laboratory tests it had worked, but that was under controlled conditions, and it had not always been without failures in the bargain. There could be long- term side effects, and if the biochemistry of the individual was such that he or she had a slow metabolic rate, death could ensue.

  He had only moments to finish his part in the charade. The crate had been called for by a pair of dark figures brandishing the paperwork, large men with Eskimo-like features, whom he was told were Mohawk Indians.

  Leave it to Ovierto, he thought. "Get the lid on properly," he ordered a pair of assistants who quickly closed out the picture of the helpless pair in the icy box.

  "Out of sight, out of mind," he said quietly.

  "We're not going to let them out of our sight," said one of Riley's friends, a man named Johnson.

  "Orders, Johnson. We got orders to stand down."

  "Wait a minute. I don't care what Riley or that cop from Chicago said to you, we're—"

  "Not Riley, not Muro," he said flatly.

  "What?"

  He pulled out a envelope. "Read it."

  Johnson did so. He saw that it was from the head of the FBI. It ordered not only Boas and the others to back off the rendezvous with Ovierto, but also Muro and Riley.

  "We go ahead with this plan," said Boas, "and we say they left before we got the message."

  "Will that wash?"

  "They'll retire me a few months earlier, so? Let's help the Indians now."

  Boas thought of his last few encounters with Donna Thorpe, his visit to Washington State in particular. He had had a secret reason for going to Washington beyond his personal reasons. His superiors had sent him. He was asked to give a full psychological profile not on the killer, Ovierto —as he had long before done —but a profile on Inspector Thorpe. He had been sent to spy on her.

  And now a command decision had been made, based on his report on Thorpe, he was absolutely certain, a decision which read: leave her in the cold where she has chosen to go. Ironically, Muro and Riley, also had chosen to go into the cold in an even more dramatic fashion. At any rate the three agents would be cut off, on their own, a policy which supposedly went against every notion the FBI stood for. But Ovierto had had his effect on more than just Thorpe. Ovierto had eroded confidences and trusts throughout the network. He had everyone running scared.

  Holding Riley's pals and those agents who had worked with Thorpe back was going to be no easy task. It would mark him as a first class asshole, one of the ones who had turned his back on Thorpe. Only he had gone ahead with the mad, daring plan concocted by Muro and which, so far, had gone unreported to Washington.

  He watched the others move the container onto a conveyor belt which ground its gears and whined and carried Riley and Muro out through a door where a Dodge pickup truck that had seen better days awaited it. The muscular pair of Mohawks hefted the crate with grunts but without any other signs of effort. Boas watched from the dark interior of the cold storage house, chilled to the bone, wondering if he had not sealed Muro's fate as well as Thorpe's.

  The girls were on their own, except for Riley. Brave young fellow, Boas thought, before he rushed for the warmer outer offices of the warehouse where the other agents had to be told. His legs and back ached from age, tension, and frustration.

  But he brought himself up to his full height and cleared his throat, drawing on his inner strength and his German heritage. He'd hold the others in check here until it was reasonable to assume they could move in. Thorpe wanted a showdown. Well, now she had gotten her wish.

  Boas said a silent prayer for the rash Thorpe, the brave Muro, and the foolish Riley.

  He confided in no one the strange message that had been relayed to him regarding an explosion at the Pentagon, a bomb that devastated an entire office, killing General Sampson Wright and his aide and destroying much property and information on Pythagoras. Boas silently cursed the horrid govern-mental project and all the calamity that it had fathered.

  Wassssss re... mem... ber... ing.

  Flashing back? Or was this real time?

  Robyn couldn't distinguish past from present, sound from silence, light from dark. Her senses seemed embalmed, but not her mind and memory.

  They waited for hours before anyone showed up with the paperwork for the crate. In the meantime, Riley had cleared the place of operatives. Only Boas, he, and Robyn remained to wait. And here they were, donning wet suits to retain some of the body heat until the drug should take hold. Riley nestled in beside her. Each carried a sidearm and an additional hypodermic filled with the fluid that would keep them from freezing to death. Getting inside, lying flat, making room for the crow bar and Riley, was a task in itself, and bits of debris from the previous occupants had clung to the bottom ice. It was like climbing into a cold, dirty refrigerator for a sleep. Boas
quickly made the necessary injections and began tamping down the lid which, like the rest of the crate, had a wood exterior and hard plastic on the inside. On either side of them were several pairs of pipes that held freon. It was cramped and dark and freezing, but the amount of air would not be a problem for the short trip, especially since small, near- invisible wedges had been worked into the edges of the top. It was the only tampering they'd done, and so long as the box remained in cool areas, not much in the way of condensation or smoke would rise up and out.

  Robyn felt the drug starting to take hold. She felt her tense body begin to float, almost as if it were above the floor of the crate. The place had become as black as a coffin, and she prayed it would not become hers and Riley's. She could no longer feel Riley, except for the mass that he represented pushing at her side. As for touch, she'd lost that altogether. Now she was at the mercy of the drug.

  She could not hear herself. Could not hear her own heart beat or the whir of blood in her ears, nothing. She could not hear herself breathing, and the silence was fearfully deep and seemingly endless, like an unexpected pit that she had fallen into. She wondered what emotions Riley was experiencing. She wondered if the silence was driving him as mad as it seemed to be driving her. She felt no lifting and shoving of the crate as it was moved and she began to wonder if, indeed, it had been moved, or if the Dr. O had taken sudden control of the situation, come into the storage facility, and cleverly figured it all out, leaving her and Riley to die enclosed in the case of icy freon.

  The darkness began to work on her mind also. She could see and think, yes, but all that she could see was blackness. All she could think was blackness. She and Riley had taken the place of the dead, and now they were returned to the grave site where the two Thorpes were interred, only it was them who were interred, and she now had awakened from the drug and found herself not in the storage box but in the earth!

  How much time had gone by? How much? A few minutes? Ten, fifteen? An hour? Two? She'd brought a flashlight with her and she wore her watch, but she could move neither her hands nor her arms nor any-thing else. She was a prisoner of her own body. She began to imagine that she was sweating and that the beads of sweat were freezing over her skin, turning to crystals that itched and itched, but she was unable to scratch.

  "Riley! Riley!" her mind screamed, but her mouth could not form the words; her every muscle had gone flaccid and numb. She tried to hear his inner turmoil, to hear his silent screams, but there was nothing to hear. She tried desperately to hear noises outside the box, but her sense of hearing, along with all others, seemed dead. She wondered if she were not dead.

  Calm down, calm down! she told herself. She didn't have to fight to do so, however. Any more calm and she would be dead, she reminded herself now. If anything, she must fight to be less calm, to force herself to think of the reason she was here, surrounded in all this blackness, to remember Ovierto's ugly face and his uglier heart. She thought about Donna Thorpe and what Ovierto had put her through. She reminded herself that Donna was standing alone against him somewhere outside this darkness. She held firm to that terrible thought.

  Beside her, like so many potatoes in a bag, Riley felt like dead weight. He was likely struggling just as she was with the effects of the deprivation drug. Boas had said not to fight it, but she was damned if she could do anything but fight it. Still, only her mind seemed able to function. All of the other sense organs had shut down completely. Her fingertips felt like so many Paper-Mate pens attached to the club of her hand, none of it flesh and blood.

  But while she felt cold, she was not shivering. The drug was doing its job. Now she had to place her trust in providence. But her breath seemed gone along with her feelings, and if she had stopped breathing...

  TWENTY -FOUR

  Cornwall, Canada

  "I have many misgivings, believe me," Donna Thorpe wrote on the motel letterhead where she was staying in Cornwall, Canada, awaiting word from Dr. O. It was her final line in a letter she had postmarked for Robyn Muro in care of the Department at Quantico. In the letter she spoke of her regrets about Bateman, Sykes, Joe Swisher, and everyone else this evil had touched. She also explained that she intended to die if she must, but that she would take Ovierto with her. "Just be certain to bury me with the remains of my parents," she had finished.

  She called the desk and asked if there had been any messages for her. Nothing.

  "Can you get me a taxi?"

  "Where is it madame wishes to go?" asked the French Canadian at the other end.

  "The dam?"

  "Do you mean the Saunders Dam?"

  "Yes, I suppose."

  "Ahhhh, that is no problem."

  Thorpe considered this a moment. "Is there another dam?"

  "There are many along the seaway. Iroquois, In- gleside, Long Sault..."

  "Which is the largest."

  "Oh, Saunders, madame."

  "Where is the Robert Moses dam?"

  1Ahhh, but the Saunders dam is the Moses dam! One half Canada, one half America." His manner seemed to say she was a fool.

  "That's the one."

  "Ahhhh, that is not difficult, madame."

  "Thank you, I will be ready in fifteen minutes."

  "I will have a cab for you then."

  "Thank you."

  "You are welcome."

  "Oh, and the Eisenhower Locks? Are they at the dam?"

  He laughed and quickly apologized. "No, no, madame, they are on the American side. You will have to go through customs over the bridge that you may see from your window."

  She glanced out at the arching, towering bridge that spanned a section of the great seaway, crossing to what was called Cornwall Island on the map she had spread before her, a Mohawk Indian Reservation that straddled Canada and the United States. The Indians went freely across the border and through customs, being residents of both countries. That was how Ovierto would get the bodies where he wanted them to go, she supposed, if he indeed actually had them. He would use well-paid Mohawks who would ask no questions.

  She only wished she knew the destination. Would he bring them to the dam on the Canadian side? The American side? Or would he take them to the locks? She did not know.

  She quickly freshened up her face before going out to the waiting cab. Beneath her cream-colored jacket her .38 bulged. She had loaded it with ammunition that would explode outward on impact. Her purse bulged, too, with the bogus Pythagoras papers, which were stuffed with plastique explosives.

  After a brief, pleasant drive, she was soon standing on the enormous wall of the dam, staring out over the superstructure from an observation tower that wrapped completely around it. A guide pointed out that halfway across began the American side, staring back at them through observation glasses, were the Americans visiting the Robert Moses dam.

  She placed a quarter into one of the machines and viewed the panoramic plain along the mammoth sea-way, a restful place overlooking the calm waters below, where fishermen in boats came dangerously close to the dam's intake valves. She asked a guide to point out the locks, and she found them in the near distance, east of the dam. From here it looked like any ordinary factory, though without the accompanying waste products being thrown up by the Reynolds Aluminum plant and the GM plant over on the American side. Still, the Canadians joined in the smog-making here in Cornwall, where a complete cumulus cloud with soft white edges, made of a stifling, malodorous sulfur from the wood pulp mill, billowed thick enough to throw a large portion of the old district into shade.

  She had hoped she would be contacted somewhere along her tour of the dam, and she wasn't disappointed. She turned her attention to the American side, the dirty commercial field glasses shutting down just as she saw the man on the American side staring back at her. It was Ovierto.

  She fought to find another quarter in her purse, the papers there in her way. She finally got the machine working again and stared at the empty window opposite some two hundred or so feet in the observa-tion tower at
the Moses side of the dam. The bastard knew exactly where she was. It was up to him now.

  A man near her bent over to pick up some piece of paper that seemed to materialize from his palm. He then cleared his throat and said in a thick Indian accent, "You dropped this, missy."

  The man hurried off as soon as he pushed the crushed paper into her hand.

  She Opened it and read the message that was clearly in Ovierto's hand:

  Welcome to Canada. Now, proceed to the locks, alone. Wait there until further instructions reach you.

  For the first time she was truly afraid. She checked for the cyanide capsule which she need only burst with her teeth to end everything. She didn't intend to be taken alive by Ovierto, if that was his intention.

  Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw the guard on duty here staring at her, but maybe she was just getting paranoid now.

  She rushed back down, taking the stairs. Too impatient to wait for a crowded elevator to arrive, she searched the expansive parking area for the taxi she'd asked to wait, but it was gone.

  "Damn, damn," she muttered before rushing back inside and asking the guard on the ground floor to call a cab for her. In a rather haughty manner that made him look more like a butler than a guard 1 he indicated the pay phones. She went to the book, which was less than half the size of the D.C. phone book, and she located a cab company and called.

  While she waited, she found a tourist map which showed the way clearly from here to the locks. When the cab arrived, she became instantly suspicious of the driver, who was rather clean-shaven, with closely cropped hair, broad shoulders, and a white shirt stuffed into black pants. She smelled Mounted Police all over him, and she guessed it was Robyn Muro's doing, siccing these guys on her for "protection." Damn her anyway, she said to herself.