The Hound of Justice

by Claire O'Dell

  “For the one hundredth time,” Raven said. “Please get into this truck.”

  “No. I will not go without my sister. I—”

  Sa’id broke off her argument with a cry. The next moment she had dropped her bag and was tearing over the parking lot, toward three women emerging from the fog.

  “Kalila!”

  The sisters buried themselves in a tight embrace. Both were sobbing and laughing and kissing each other’s cheeks.

  Micha and Sara strolled over to Raven to catch up on the news. Micha glanced around, eyebrows raised. “We appear to be missing one guest.”

  Dane joined us. Her eyes were red rimmed, as though she’d been weeping. “Goddamned woman locked herself in her office,” she said. “My fault. Hound—”

  “Hush,” Sara said. “We can trade blame later, if you like. Right now, let’s get out before reinforcements show up. Dr. Sa’id?” She gently touched Sa’id’s arm. “Come, we have very little time as you know.”

  Sa’id detached herself from her sister, who appeared dazed at her sudden rescue, and led her to the truck. Raven deposited the bag at her feet, then headed toward the van. I got into the back of our escape vehicle with the sisters. Benches with safety harnesses lined both sides, and the front of the cargo area was stuffed with crates and boxes.

  Micha took the wheel, with Sara next to her. “Medical kit at your feet,” Micha called to me. “More supplies in the crates for later.”

  A plastic cooler at my feet contained the drugs I would need for the surgery. I found the sedatives and gave Kalila Sa’id two tablets, which she swallowed dry. Meanwhile, Micha had eased the truck over the gravel parking lot to the driveway. The others had split between the van and a second car, leaving the Buick behind. Before she jumped into the van, Raven lobbed a small object at the Buick.

  A dull boom rolled through the air, and the sky lit up with flames.

  “I wish we could’ve bombed that factory,” Sara muttered.

  “No time and you know that,” Micha replied. “Safety belts fastened, please. Ready? Takeoff in one, two, three . . .”

  With a jolt, the truck leaped forward. Sa’id gave a yelp, and my teeth clicked together. Micha didn’t even slow down. We were bouncing around on our seats, in spite of those safety belts.

  “How is everyone doing back there?” she called out.

  “Oh, just spiffy,” I said. “Drive faster, why don’t you?”

  Micha laughed. Sa’id had recovered some of her salt, because now she launched into a tirade about how we had promised to remove the poison from her sister. There was no telling, she said, when the Brotherhood would answer Adler’s alarm and trigger the packet from afar.

  “Goddammit, we know that,” Sara snapped. “But we need to put some distance between us and that factory. Settle down, lady.”

  Our biochemist settled down, but with an audible huff that said she wasn’t satisfied. Kalila leaned her head against her sister’s shoulder and whispered in Arabic. I didn’t need to translate the words to know they were still anxious, still uncertain about their rescuers.

  Yeah, what if those nasties had taken Grace captive, and I’d been forced into treason? I might not be so mellow neither.

  My heart squeezed tight at the thought. Give a drop of mercy, Reverend Francis had told us. One day, you might need a drop yourself. Maybe the old gospel had it right.

  Without warning, Micha swung the truck into a hard left, leaving the road and the other two vehicles. The next half hour felt like a never-ending nightmare as we bounced and swerved over the uneven ground. The cargo was hot and airless and reeked of tobacco. Grass whipped against the truck’s sides. We had no headlights, just a sliver of moon and the stars. Where had Kite found this truck?

  By whatever criteria Micha used—map or mileage or simply instinct—she finally judged we were far enough from the factory. “Good enough,” she said. “Let’s get to work. Everyone out of the truck.”

  Within moments, Micha had spread a plastic sheet over the floor of the cargo area, and Sara had unpacked the crate with my surgical instruments. That, it seemed, would be my operating table. The truck’s overhead light was bright enough, and the floor of the cargo area made a steady surface, but these were not the most ideal conditions.

  Understatement of the year, trademark pending.

  Even so, better than Alton, Illinois.

  “What else do you need?” Micha asked.

  “A nurse,” I said. “Dr. Sa’id. I want you to assist.”

  “Of course.”

  Sara and Micha took up guard outside the truck with two AK-15s.

  “Take off your shirt and lie down,” I told Kalila. “Head pointing to the driver’s-side door, please.”

  Sa’id and I climbed into the back. Micha’s clever foresight had provided me with a canister of hot water and disinfectant soap. Sa’id and I both donned masks. At my direction, she scrubbed her hands and forearms thoroughly, while I scrubbed just my right hand and arm. Even though my nerves were yammering at me to hurry, hurry, I waited through five more minutes to let the disinfectant work. Then we pulled on our surgical gloves.

  “We don’t have a suction unit,” I told Sa’id. “But when I call for it, you’ll swab away the blood with these sterile gauze pads.”

  She nodded, her eyes dark and wide over her mask.

  I laid out my instruments, naming them as I did. Scalpel. Forceps. Needle with sutures threaded. Needle driver. Then I filled two syringes each with the 1 percent lidocaine solutions. My hands both trembled, and I was reviewing all my drills under my breath. This was a simple operation, I reminded myself.

  The packet made a slight bulge directly below the eighth rib. I wiped down the incision site with antiseptic swabs. Injected the first dose next to the site, taking care to avoid the packet itself.

  “Four minutes,” I told the sisters. “Then we test for numbness.”

  Those four minutes felt longer than the thirty we’d taken to drive here. Without a clock I had to count the time. When I reached my best guess, I gently probed the site with my scalpel. Kalila moaned. Immediately I stopped. “You need another dose?”

  “Yes, but don’t wait any longer. I want that . . . that thing out of my body.”

  Right. She’d lived with that threat for almost six months.

  I gave her a second injection, then, working as quickly as I dared, I made a subcostal incision parallel to her rib cage and just below the packet itself. “Swab,” I said. Sa’id wiped away the blood welling up from the cut. Luckily there wouldn’t be much, not with such a shallow incision.

  Now I gently worked my fingers into the incision and around the edge of the packet. As I started to ease it from my patient, I felt a faint resistance and immediately stopped.

  What the hell?

  Very cautiously, I explored with my right hand, trusting more to my human nerves than my electronic ones.

  A small rectangle. Two point five millimeters by five millimeters according to Lazarus’s readout. Standard size for a medical implant these days. Not that you needed much space for a dose of mamba venom. I proceeded with even more caution, until I’d worked my way around to the opposite side, where my fingers encountered a thick filament, attached to the packet and continuing deeper into the chest cavity.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Kalila stirred uneasily. Salmah Sa’id whispered to her soothingly in Arabic, but her eyes were fixed on me. Location, location, where did that filament lead? It wasn’t simply a leftover suture from the original operation.

  I closed my eyes and thought hard. Of course, Adler would not rely on a single, simple threat to keep her biochemist in line. (Though god knows, black mamba poison was hardly simple.) No. Adler had a twisty brain. That much I’d seen. She had to be the one behind all those interlocking safeguards for the laboratory. So. What was that filament connected to? The abdominal aorta was a good candidate—Kalila would bleed out in seconds if it ruptured.

  But that made no sen
se. A careless surgeon might have attempted to remove the packet without noticing the filament, but Adler must have planned for all possible paths.

  My head hurts.

  “Why did you stop?” Sa’id’s voice was thin and edged with panic.

  I leaned toward her and whispered. “A complication. There’s a . . . you might call it a string. Connected to the packet and something else, deeper underneath her ribs. I could cut the string and investigate later, once we’re across the border and in a hospital. But . . .”

  “But you suspect we cannot.”

  “Exactly. I’m going to give your sister a stronger dose of anesthesia. I’ll remove the packet, then see where that string leads.”

  “Doc.” That was Micha. “What’s the status?”

  “Almost ready to close up,” I lied.

  I snipped the filament and oh so carefully removed the packet. “Ziplock bag, please.”

  Sa’id extracted one from our supply crate. I dropped the packet into the bag, and at my order, she sealed it and stowed it in the crate.

  Now I reviewed the vials of anesthesia. Filled a syringe with another dose of the lidocaine. We were skirting close to the maximum dose, but I didn’t want my patient to make any sudden movements.

  While we waited for the lidocaine to take effect, I stripped off my surgical gloves. I wasn’t sure what we’d find, but my instincts told me that I’d need Lazarus’s micro-surgical programming. I flicked the control panel open and tapped in the necessary sequence. Maybe it was my imagination, but an electric buzz seemed to ripple down my arm, both ghost and metal, as Lazarus responded to the commands.

  Once more I scrubbed my right hand and arm, then pulled on a fresh pair of gloves.

  “Retractor,” I said. “Keep that incision open, please.”

  I might need to cut deeper, but I wanted a line of direction for that filament.

  I probed the incision and located the filament. Nothing, nothing. I picked up my scalpel with Lazarus and slid the blade along the filament millimeter by millimeter. Blood welled up. Without my asking, Sa’id held the retractor open with one hand and wiped away the blood with more gauze.

  More exploration. The electric buzz along my ghost arm turned into a fierce bright burning sensation. Dammit. Sydney had never warned me about such a reaction. Maybe I was special.

  I was sweating, and not just from the warm humid night.

  “Doc?” Sa’id whispered.

  “Give me a minute.”

  Except we had very few minutes to spare. I breathed through my nose and willed my ghost arm to behave. Nothing doing, said ghost arm. Right. Then it’s time to bite down and finish the operation anyway.

  More blood. More gauze. More of my wishing I had a real operating theater with all the instruments and devices that came with it.

  And then, my fingers brushed against a noticeable lump, directly under the ninth rib. I froze. Oh, dear god. Of course. She implanted two packets, one to trigger the next, in case anyone got careless. And if we left this one alone, she could still trigger it from a distance.

  Taking up my scalpel, I cut slowly and cautiously around the new packet, aiming up directly into the chest cavity. My left arm felt like a strange double entity, the ghost arm consumed by imaginary flames, Lazarus edging closer to the packet, each movement precise.

  My fingers closed around packet number two. For a horrible moment, I wondered if Adler had connected yet a third packet, but I soon determined that wasn’t so. I drew the packet out of my patient. “Gauze,” I croaked. “Then a ziplock.”

  Sa’id hadn’t bothered to wait. She packed gauze into the incision, then dumped the second packet in its own ziplock next to the first one. By now that strange doubled sensation had died away, though my instincts still yammered at me to hurry, hurry, hurry before the enemy overran the border, and didn’t I hear that warning siren?

  I took up the needle with its thread of suture. Focused on its bright sharp point. Just a moment, because we truly did need to hurry. But this wasn’t Alton. This was Cloudy, Oklahoma, or close enough for government purposes. And this time, this time, I would have my damned victory.

  I stitched the wound closed. Washed the skin with antiseptic. Checked the patient’s stats. Blood pressure high. Pulse rapid. Both within normal for the situation. If Nadine Adler had any more tricks to throw at us, they weren’t evident.

  “Doc, what the hell are you doing in there?” Micha’s voice was hardly more than a whisper.

  “All done,” I said. “Patient is doing well.”

  “Good, because we’re about to get company.”

  Methodical switched places with in a tearing hurry. I covered Kalila with a blanket and dumped all my instruments into the crate. Micha already had the engine running.

  Sara climbed into the back of the truck. Her eyes widened at all the bloody gauze, but she only said, “Dr. Sa’id, you ride up front next to Ferret. I’m taking the rear guard.”

  Sa’id scrambled out of the truck, then into the front seat. Sara doused the overhead lights and pulled the tailgate shut. “Make yourself steady,” she told me. “We have a rough ride ahead of us. Ferret, let’s go!”

  She braced herself into a corner, weapon ready. I grabbed the backseat and a handy tie-down bolt. Micha floored the gas pedal. The truck jumped forward and we took off.

  Just in time, because I heard the roar of an engine in the distance. How the hell had they tracked us?

  “Please tell me those are kids out late with Daddy’s ATV,” I said.

  “That would be lovely,” Sara agreed. “By the way—”

  The truck took a hard bounce, and Kalila Sa’id gave a muffled cry. Sara went silent as I hurriedly checked the sutures. No bleeding, but obviously the lidocaine was wearing off.

  “What happened with the operation?” Sara continued, once I was done.

  “A surprise gift from Adler,” I said. “Not one packet, but two, connected.”

  “Ah. Then it’s possible . . .”

  We burst out of the grass, onto a paved road. Micha swung the truck hard to the right. The truck swerved, fishtailing into the grass, then Micha gunned the engine and we took off down what looked like a state highway.

  “How far to the border?” I called out.

  “Sixty miles, maybe seventy,” Micha shouted back. “Not exactly sure where we are right now. Sara? Any idea?”

  “Absolutely. About ten steps ahead of the goddamned enemy.”

  As if God were listening to our inanities, headlights flashed behind us. That would be our pursuers, making the same wild turn as we had.

  “One vehicle,” Sara observed. “Not so bad.”

  She laid her AK-15 to one side, plucked a small round object from one of the cargo nets. With a flick of her thumb, she released the safety pin, then took aim and threw.

  Smoke and fire exploded on the road. The truck swerved. Missed, dammit. But Sara had already launched a second grenade. The truck regained the highway just as the grenade exploded. Headlights spun over and over, then came to rest.

  “Yes! Oh, dammit, no! Ferret, stop, stop now.”

  A figure, illuminated by the flames, staggered out of the other truck.

  “Adler,” Sara breathed.

  Oh god. It can’t be.

  Abruptly the world appeared to slow. I remember crawling toward the rear of our truck and staring at that lone survivor of the wreck. A burst of fire illuminated the scene. Adler faced forward, unsteady on her feet. Her face was masked in blood. She held one arm at an awkward angle. The other cradled a rifle.

  Micha had slowed our truck and glanced over her shoulder. “Shit.”

  She gunned the engine—just in time. Bullets ricocheted off the side of our truck. Sara snatched up her AK-15 and fired back. More bullets sprayed the truck. Swearing, Sara loosed another round at the same moment Adler did.

  Adler spun around in the spray of blood. She dropped to her knees and toppled over.

  I was about to cheer, when Sara dr
opped her gun and tumbled out of the truck.

  “Stop! Stop!” I screamed.

  Micha jammed on the brakes and ran to the back of the truck. She was cursing under her breath. “No time,” she breathed. “We have to make the border and soon or—” Her voice broke on a sob. “Sa’id, you take the wheel. Keep driving.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t argue. Now go!”

  She grabbed her gun and vanished into the night.

  22

  I snatched up a flashlight and aimed it down the highway. The beam caught Micha’s silhouette—a blurred shadow running toward the spot where Sara had fallen from our truck. Not far beyond that, a faint red glow marked Adler’s burning vehicle. My imagination supplied any number of bodies scattered about. There might even have been an armed survivor or two.

  “Micha!” I called out.

  Micha never slowed. Damn, that woman could run. I had sucked in my breath to shout again when her shadow ducked to the ground, then vanished. I frantically swept the flashlight beam around, but the fog had grown thicker and even the distant flames were dying down.

  Swearing softly to myself, I spun around on my heels. Salmah Sa’id was still in the passenger seat, her head bowed, her hands clasped together, as though imploring the gods to intervene. I wanted to smack her into action. At the same time, I was damned close to collapsing into tears myself.

  My first duty, however, was to my patient.

  Kalila Sa’id’s pulse beat far too fast, and her skin felt clammy to my touch. Shock. On the positive side, her stitches had held, and the liquid seeping out was clear. All signs and symptoms good, considering.

  But we still had a helluva way to go. I rummaged through the medicine chest, found the vial of diazepam. Filled another of my syringes, swiped the injection site with an alcohol pad, and injected my patient with a 10 ml dose.