Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2)

by Hunt Kingsbury

Happy to have someone to talk about it with, Lisa said, “I’d said it to him before, but he’d never said it to me.”

  O’Brian’s heart sank. McAlister wasn’t meeting her here. That was why he’d told her he loved her. He was leaving. It had been an apologetic goodbye.

  “Do you know where he is?” she asked.

  He took a step back, took a small microphone out of his lapel, and said, “Stand down. He’s not coming. This entire meeting was a decoy.” He told Ferguson to call the FBI and run McAlister’s name. “He’ll try boats, trains, or planes--something fast.”

  O’Brian had been avoiding calls from the FBI all day, referring them to his superior. He’d wanted to get McAlister on his own, so he could get all the credit, but now he’d run out of time. There was no way he’d be able to fend off the FBI any longer, especially if McAlister had left the state or country.

  He realized Lisa was still sitting in front of him. She’d asked him a question.

  “What?”

  She stood. As he’d guessed, she was nearly his height. “Do you know where he is?”

  O’Brian stood up straight, trying to make himself taller than her. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

  “He hasn’t done anything wrong. He was with me this morning.”

  O’Brian rolled his eyes and took her by the elbow, “Come on, we’re going to the precinct. You and I need to talk.”

  She didn’t resist.

  As they walked to his car he started working on her. “Lisa, I need to find Thomas as fast as I can. Whether he’s guilty or not, I need to talk to him before he gets deeper in trouble, or god forbid, hurt.”

  “I have no idea where he’s gone. None at all. I thought he’d be here.”

  He wanted to tell her that he’d catch McAlister with or without her help, but he held his tongue. He needed her to think he was a friend, someone who could help her and Thomas.

  He opened the back door of his car and she slid in.

  He got in the front and said, “Well, Lisa, at least one of us was glad he told you he loved you for the first time today.”

  “You guys are going to have a hard time catching Thomas.”

  “Oh yeah? Why is that?”

  He looked at her in the rearview mirror.

  “Because, Detective, he isn’t easy to catch. I should know.”

  She smiled ruefully.

  O’Brian shook his head sadly, put the car in gear and drove away.

  Chapter 15

  Uri “The Clone” Andropov sat one row behind McAlister and Bertram on Flight 505 to Tibet. He’d had to pay handsomely to get the exact seat he wanted. As usual, money had worked.

  Uri was staring at a picture of a black widow spider he’d torn from a magazine. He’d been staring at it, dreaming about it and nothing else, for over an hour. The passenger sitting next to him was beginning to get worried.

  Uri had been born in Hungary and abandoned by his parents at age four. An acquaintance of his father’s, who worked for a traveling circus, had taken him in. Uri had traveled with the circus doing whatever jobs he could. Mostly, he was like a powder monkey on an eighteenth-century English frigate—forgotten, only used for jobs nobody else wanted.

  Looking back years later, he realized that he’d unofficially been a sex slave. During his tenure with the circus, he’d been raped almost nightly, usually by the unskilled laborers responsible for set-up and tear-down of the tents and equipment.

  As he grew older, he was given small performance parts in the circus, which required him to learn how to use make-up and costumes. He often needed the make-up to hide the previous night’s bruises.

  He loved performing. It was the only time he forgot the savage treatment that awaited him at night. By the time he was thirteen, he’s become the top gymnast in the troupe.

  Then one night after a show, he was awakened by Bartoc, a hulking, savage man who liked their sex to have a rape-like quality. Uri would never forget the way Bartoc’s breath smelled: a sickening mix of stale red wine and cheap cigars.

  For some reason, that night Uri had chosen to fight back as Bartoc started his routine. With an animal-like fury he’d never felt before, Uri had pulled Bartoc’s neck down towards him and had bitten through his jugular vein.

  Bartoc was a large man and after his jugular severed, Uri was showered with thick, warm blood. It was the first time Uri had ever had an orgasm.

  Bartoc was the first person he’d ever killed. He’d killed him like one animal kills another, like a lion kills a gazelle, by biting through the jugular. If he hadn’t killed Bartoc that way, he might not have become an assassin. But because he had, he’d spent the remainder of his life getting paid trying to replicate his first orgasm.

  He knew his desire and ability to disguise himself was, at some level, an attempt to escape from who he really was, from the terrifying abuse he’d experienced as a child. Rather than fight it, he’d accepted it. Through disguise and trying to emulate animals when he killed other people, he fought to make it all okay.

  Animals killed daily to survive. They killed with pride: no compassion, regret, or guilt. Uri would never become a true animal, at least not in this life, but he could imitate them.

  On the plane, in the seat directly behind McAlister, he was dreaming about ways he might imitate a spider while killing McAlister.

  The way to do it would be to lay McAlister on his back and straddle him, testes dangling over solar plexus. He’d want to put a needle-sharp point of one fang squarely on the left jugular vein, hold it there firmly, then put the other fang on the right jugular, again centered exactly over the vein.

  When both were firmly in place and perfectly aligned, he would forcefully shove them both through the vein, into the core of the neck. There would be initial resistance as the fangs encountered the thin, muscular veneer of the arytenoid cartilage which surrounds the esophagus. But once punctured, it would be clean, smooth, and heavenly.

  Just thinking about it caused Uri to become sexually aroused.

  In studying spiders, Uri had become convinced that humans had evolved incorrectly, with inner skeletons and weak, wrinkly, easily penetrable skin on the outside. Vital organs like the heart, liver, and kidneys were exposed, protected only by thin sheaves of muscle and brittle ribs with spaces between them.

  Constant body armor like that of insects and arachnids was far more protective. And the fangs—oh God, the fangs—razor sharp, shiny, and as hard as marble. He could hardly think of them without getting an erection.

  How good it would feel to stretch them out, to point them at his target, to pounce and sink them as deeply as he could into his prey. Driving venom through them; feeling the venom, like ejaculate, flow out into the victim. Knowing the victim’s heart rate would soon slow, the skin around the bite would begin to decompose, internal organs would become liquefied.

  Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

  This was it! It was perfect. He’d have fangs handcrafted in Asia out of stainless steel. They’d be large, an inch in diameter and eight inches long, so he could hold one in each hand. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? Sometimes he could be such a fucking genius.

  The Clone was ready to burst out of his seat and bounce off the ceiling of the airplane like an overwound coil. This idea was too good to be true: fangs! Fangs like a black widow! He was so excited he wondered if he should get up and go directly to the bathroom to masturbate.

  He stifled the urge, and instead took out a piece of paper and began carefully drawing the fangs he would commission in Lhasa. He drew them to scale. It helped him settle down and relax. It was important to relax and enjoy this part of the chase.

  He looked up at the back of McAlister’s head. Spiders were always on guard, alert for vibrations on their webs, and McAlister was like a stupid moth fluttering about blindly.

  It only takes a few minutes for a miniscule drop of venom to liquefy every organ and vessel in a moth’s unprotected, pathetic body.

  How good
McAlister’s organs would taste as a warm organic malt, blended to perfection, and sucked through the small, perfectly round hole the fang makes when it administers the venom.

  The Clone smiled to himself and shook his head. Why hadn’t he thought of the spider analogy before? It was so perfect he knew he’d be able to use it again and again. It was quite possible that this fantasy would never cease to arouse him, that he’d never tire of it as he eventually had with his other animalistic fantasies.

  He couldn’t wait to be alone. Then he looked down at the page and, with renewed intensity, began to draw fangs. He was careful to make the points look razor-sharp so there would be no confusion, no miscommunication, when he showed the drawing to the machinist.

  Chapter 16

  A desk jockey. A cheap, run-of-the-mill desk jockey. That’s what DJ Warrant had become. A fate worse than death.

  When DJ had failed to confiscate the Ark and the Ten Commandments from McAlister, his effectiveness as an agent had come under scrutiny. As a result of that failure, and the Presidential demerit, he’d been moved out of the Special Projects Division--where he’d thrived for fifteen years--and into the Domestic Crimes Division.

  In Domestic, he and his case partner Elmo were assigned to the Vice Unit. Vice consisted of interstate prostitution rings, organized crime, and other mundane, dirty, minor felonies committed by small-time perps.

  The move had been humiliating, and under normal conditions would have prompted DJ to retire. However, he’d delayed his retirement for one reason: so he could use agency resources to exact revenge against the man who’d caused his demise. Thomas McAlister.

  For the past eight months, without permission from the agency, using forged requisitions, he’d been running surveillance on McAlister, following his movements and monitoring his communications.

  DJ could have simply taken McAlister to a deserted warehouse and shot him. But while he was an old-school tough guy, he was not a cold-blooded killer.

  Besides, he didn’t want swift revenge. McAlister had cast a pall over his entire career, erasing DJ’s reputation as the FBI’s best agent. He’d caused DJ to be reassigned and ridiculed by his peers, by men DJ had trained.

  The revenge couldn’t be quick and painless. To do it quickly would be too forgiving. McAlister’s punishment needed to be spread out over a long period of time. It should involve the loss of someone or something dear to him. McAlister himself would have a hand in his own undoing.

  DJ looked again at the picture of McAlister pinned to the cork on the wall of his cubicle. He knew the face better than he knew his own. The intense, hopeful blue eyes, the sun-streaked disheveled hair. He knew the creases bracketing McAlister’s mouth. He knew the exact location of the small brown mole below the left corner of his mouth. On one particularly bad day, he’d even counted McAlister’s eyelashes.

  He was gazing at the picture again as the weekly report detailing McAlister’s activities was being delivered to his desk. The report had become annoyingly predictable, and then suddenly last week, McAlister was on the move again.

  If McAlister was after something, especially something he felt could help save his friend Taylor’s life, DJ would take it from him, dangle it in front of him, and then destroy it. The fact that Taylor had helped McAlister outsmart DJ last time would make this even sweeter.

  He still remembered the way they’d both laughed at him--such smartasses with their inside jokes.

  DJ tore open the report, scanning the cover page.

  Ah. Perfect! He knew McAlister would be quick to act. McAlister was already en route to Tibet. DJ wondered what he would do when he got there, how long would it take him to find the Blue Beryl. As much as he hated McAlister, DJ knew if there was anyone who could find the Blue Beryl, it was McAlister. The man could find a needle in a haystack blindfolded.

  DJ wished Elmo was still around to help him scan databases, so they could figure out more about what McAlister was doing. He finished reading the report and pushed it away. Reading it only made him want to go to Tibet.

  A feeling of triumph swelled inside him. All of his planning, all of his waiting was going to pay off. He felt as if he were in a chess game with McAlister, and even though they’d just started playing, victory was certain.

  For the first time in a long time, DJ’s confidence rose. He even stifled a miniscule smile. This time, he would be prepared for the unexpected. This time he would leave nothing to chance. He’d play a nasty trump card. McAlister would go down, and DJ would assume his former glory and finally retire with the respect he deserved.

  Chapter 17

  Sitting next to McAlister on the flight to Lhasa, Dr. Bertram asked, “What about religious healers?”

  “There are literally thousands of examples. One of my favorites is attributed to an Italian priest named Padre Pio who died in 1968.”

  “Never heard of him,” Bertram said.

  McAlister continued, “In 1947, Padre Pio was visited by a young Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla. At the time of their meeting, Padre Pio made a wild prediction. He told Wojtyla that he would be Pope someday. Later that year Wojtyla wrote Padre Pio and asked him to pray for a friend, a Nazi camp survivor named Wanda Polawska. Wanda was dying of cancer and not expected to live out the year.”

  “What happened?”

  “Pio prayed for her. Not a week passed and Padre Pio got a second letter from Wojtyla. Wanda was completely cured.”

  “Incredible. What about the prediction?”

  “Pope John Paul II.”

  “No!”

  “I’m serious. That’s only one of hundreds or even thousands of examples of miracles Pio was said to have performed. His specialty was bi-location--being in two places at once.”

  “Maybe the Beryl isn’t a medical book at all. Maybe it’s a book of prayers,” Bertram said jokingly.

  “We’ve got to speed everything up. We’ve got to locate the Blue Beryl as soon as possible.”

  “What about visiting Dr. Li?” Li was a doctor rumored to be using a page from the Blue Beryl to heal blind people.

  “We’ve still got to see Li. If he’s got the page, he may have some clue to its exact location. Plus, if we can see the page, we’ll at least know it if we find it.”

  “I agree. If he’s really only an hour’s car ride outside of Lhasa, it’s worth the trip.”

  “That’s about the only part of our original plan I think we should stick with. After we see Dr. Li, we start digging.”

  “No mapping?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  Bertram was silent and McAlister knew he was disappointed. Centuries earlier, the Potala Palace had been even more sprawling than it was today. Throughout history, entire wings of the palace had been burned down and never rebuilt. Bertram wanted to map the ancient perimeter and publish his findings.

  McAlister was disappointed too, but urgency and timing was everything. Any mapping would have to be done later.

  After almost being caught by Detective O’Brian, McAlister had used the taxi driver’s phone to call his research partner, Dr. Bertram. He’d explained that he was wanted by the police for crimes he did not commit, and urgently told Bertram they needed to leave the country immediately if they were ever going to finish the final stage of their search for the Blue Beryl. Bertram had acted quickly, and they’d caught the last plane to Lhasa, connecting through London.

  McAlister had hated faking the Central Park meeting with Lisa, but he had needed the time and a distraction to get out of the country. He knew the police would be monitoring Lisa’s communications, so he hadn’t spoken with her since leaving her stranded and surrounded by police in Central Park. He felt sure she’d understand.

  It felt good to be sitting in first class, secure in the knowledge that he’d escaped and that no one could possibly know where he was or what he was doing. It was calming to once again be talking with his partner about the Blue Beryl.

  “How would the thymus-boost work? Have you given any
more thought to how it might create healing?” McAlister asked.

  “It may be as simple as boosting thymus activity, thereby increasing white blood cell production. However, based on what you’ve told me about curing the blind, it makes me think it’s closer to some sort of natural genetic engineering.

  “The immune system is exceedingly complex. Our bodies are continuously under attack from an enormous variety of toxins, germs, and pollutants. The key culprits are fungi, bacteria, and viruses. There are also cancer cells, which are simply human cells that become abnormal and begin to multiply.”

  McAlister nodded.

  “All white blood cells are parented by stem cells which exist in the bone marrow. Once born, certain types of cells move to the thymus gland, which is located next to the heart. It’s really one of the most fascinating glands in the body.

  “Once in the thymus, the cells are trained to defend the body. The cells are even tested to make sure they can tell the difference between ‘self’ cells and ‘non-self’ cells. If a cell fails the test, it is not allowed to leave. Only one percent make it out of the thymus. The others are destroyed.”

  “Incredible,” McAlister breathed.

  “The thymus produces three types of cells: B-cells, T-cells, and my favorite, NKs. NK stands for ‘natural-killer,’ also called macrophages. They will attack anything. They’ll devour a virus, burst cancer cells, whatever it takes.”

  McAlister said, “So if a healer in Tibet stumbled onto a combination of herbs that boosts the thymus’ ability to produce NK cells, it could create a sort of super-immune system.”

  “Yes. Immune systems can be strengthened, and no one would argue the fact that undiscovered medicines exist in nature. It’s possible the Blue Beryl contained the key to one of these.”

  “Modern medicine doesn’t seem to focus much on immune system enhancement,” observed McAlister.

  “Why would it? If everyone’s immune system worked better, there’d be fewer people to treat. There will never be a real focus on prevention. The focus will always be on diagnosis and treatment.”