by James Abel
“Bruce. Bruce? Answers, Bruce. You hear me? Answers. I’m taking you in, if you give me answers. If you don’t give answers, I’ll kill you right now.”
“What are you . . . doing here?”
“No, no. Did you hear what I said? I ask, not you.”
“Let me up.”
I hit him twice in the face. I heard bones break. Busted nose, minimum. My hand hurt. I felt the fight go out of him. A terrorized look nested in his eyes.
Bruce said, like a ten-year-old kid, snot running freely, “It isn’t fair.”
Of everything he could have said, this shocked me and I sat back. His breath rose in puffs. He was crying. I smelled the fish he’d eaten for dinner: oregano, curry, the sweet lingering aroma of after-dinner port. I pushed the tip of the knife into him, just enough to draw blood. He moaned. His blood caught the iridescent light.
“All right, all right, stop,” he said.
I started it off. “You were a professor. You came to Barrow for research, years ago. After a while you found something at lake number nine. What did you find?”
The crying grew worse. The tears reflected, in small flashes, emerald and violet light. He blurted out, “I lost my wife over this. I lost my kids. My family. I deserve something. All those years. It isn’t fair!”
I drew back the knife.
“Cancer,” he gasped. “Pancreatic cancer.”
“A cure?”
“Yes. A cure, Joe.”
“An organism? In the lake?”
A nod.
I said, seeing it, “But you couldn’t tell anyone while you were a professor, not if you wanted to get the benefits. Your contract gave commercial rights to the school. But if you waited until after you retired, made the discovery then, you’d get profit.”
“Is that so wrong? It was my discovery. Mine!”
He was blubbering. He was hoping that someone else would show up to see the lights. It was possible. Someone might show up, especially if this spot had been recommended. But at that moment I didn’t care if someone showed up. If someone showed, I’d kill Bruce. That was a fact.
In fitful, half-choked sentences he finished the story that Liz Willoughby had started. His life was not fair because the school should have let him keep profits. Not fair because of the Supreme Court ruling denying discoverers profits from finding a natural gene. He’d waited for years, and when the prize was within reach, the court changed the game. Not fair because he had to seek help from a company overseas, a man with a shady reputation; not fair because after all the years and secrecy, the Harmons had planned to gather samples at the lake, and possibly make the same discovery Bruce had made.
“You killed them, Bruce.”
“Jens did that. I tried to make them stop. I made them have accidents. But Ted kept going. He just would not stop! So Jens was sent. He showed up. It’s not my fault.”
“And Karen?”
“Jens. Jens is crazy. Jens was a killer. I was nowhere near there. I promise.”
“Why did Jens burn down the cabin at the lake?”
“We . . . he and I . . . we went there over the summer. For samples. Our fingerprints. They were there. You were going to go there, taking a forensics team. You would have found them. My prints. And then, you know . . .”
It made sense. I would have had that cabin swept. It would have been normal procedure. I said, “And the eco lodge? What about that? The only reason it’s there, is so nobody else can use the lake, right? The whole deal is to bar the lake to research. The deal is phony.”
“The . . . lodge will be . . . real. But, yes, he bought it to block off the lake.”
“Tilda Swann?”
“Not involved. Joe! You can’t synthesize the drug. Not yet. We’re trying. The only place in the world it comes from is that lake. That lake has to be protected.”
Protected?
I felt the energy draining away from me. He babbled that the extract from the lake, in clinical trials on humans, had killed pancreatic cancer in 90 percent of cases. He said it would reduce the death rate by a huge amount. He said it was a miracle, and would save lives, thousands, more, hundreds of thousands of lives.
To my question, Where did the rabies come from? he answered that it had been designed in Siberian laboratories, during the Cold War. To my question, Who controlled it now? he told me the name of the man he’d just met.
“He’s not a good man, Joe. I had no choice but to deal with him, don’t you see? But after I made the deal with him I wrote a letter,” Bruce added slyly. “I wrote down who he was, what we did. I hid copies. He has to give me my share. Forty-nine percent! Joe, I . . . can share that money with you.”
“The man you just had dinner with.”
I envisioned the pudgy guy in the restaurant window, across from Bruce.
“Yes.
“Which hotel is he at?”
Bruce shook his head. Suddenly he was my big helper, not a whimpering victim under a knife. “He flew home, Joe. He was never staying here. He has a private jet. He left after dinner and he’s gone by now.
“Joe? Can I get up? I’m cold. I’ll cooperate. I’ll say what you want, unless you . . . want . . . to . . . share. It won’t make up for Karen, I know, I’m sorry. I am. But we can share, Joe.”
“Okay, Bruce, we’ll share. Get up.”
I strangled him.
• • •
I PRESSED DOWN AND LEANED FORWARD AND LET MY RAGE TAKE ME. I felt my fingers crunch into his neck. He was kicking. He tried to flail. I felt his breath on my face as it spurted out. I felt his life force departing. He sprayed saliva on my chin.
The last wisps, the final vaporized breath of Dr. Bruce Friday drifted, drifted, rose, and was gone.
After a moment I rose, looked around, and the rest of the world came back to me. I was dizzy with spent adrenaline. I bent down and rifled his clothes, took his wallet, his watch, and opened his fly.
On my lurching way down to town, I threw them all into a sewer opening. As for my tracks, once I was on the well-plowed streets again, they were gone. It was like getting away from bloodhounds by walking into a river. The police would find the body, and see size ten and a half footprints. But there would be no trail of those prints into town.
Back at the hotel, the blond concierge was still on duty. She smiled dazzlingly when I walked in. She asked me if I’d enjoyed my dinner. She informed me that the bus to the conference would depart the hotel at eight the next morning, and before that a delicious smorgasbord breakfast—cheeses, cold cuts, oatmeal, eggs, and fruit—would be offered from 7 A.M. on, in a dining room down the hall.
If the other man—the one Bruce had dealt with—was gone, I had no choice so I called the admiral. He was home and picked up on the second ring. “Joe?”
I laid it out for him. If the police were going to show up, someone needed to hear, now. Galli listened and sometimes made humming noises, thinking. He said, “You have Bruce Friday? The FBI will want a crack at him.”
“Death-bed confession, sir. He’s gone.”
A pause. He understood what I was saying. “You’re in Norway now?”
“I am.”
“If what you’ve told me is true, if we can connect the lodge and the deaths and him, believe me, something will happen. The president won’t accept it otherwise. I swear to you. I’ve never lied to you. Come home, Joe. First chance.”
I slept soundly, waking only once after hearing footsteps in the hallway. Police, I thought. But no knock sounded at the door.
I caught the first flight out in the morning. At Oslo, at immigration, the man opening my passport was curious as to why, after arriving yesterday, I was leaving so quickly.
“Finished my business early,” I told him.
He wagged a finger at me. All work is no good. “Next time, plan to stay and have some wint
er fun,” he said.
TWENTY-SIX
They came for him just as dessert was delivered.
Dmitri Turov—nicknamed “the angry man” in the company he owned—sat with his wife, in his favorite restaurant, Khachapuri, on the southern outskirts of Moscow. It was her birthday. She was twenty-eight. She did not like Georgian food, but he did, and he wanted it tonight.
Not a fancy place, but a great one. They sat at his favorite table under the blackboard menu. They started with mouthwatering mujuji, cold jellied pork, and plates of chopped, minced vegetables, and a terrific walnut dipping sauce for tasty breads . . . satsivi.
“This food,” his wife said, “is too spicy.”
“Fine. More for me,” he said, mouth full, eating fast.
After that, the karcho soup—beef, rice, and plum puree—and chalchokhabili—a hot soup with stewed chicken. And, of course, no Georgian dinner would be complete without plov, rice cooked in broth, smothered by delicious fish.
He was in a good mood, in superb spirits, actually, because he’d learned that very day that his lawyer in the United States had managed to obtain the letter written by Bruce Friday, stored in an Anchorage bank safe-deposit box. Bruce Friday was dead, in Norway, killed by a Norwegian robber. A few payouts, a little blackmail, a quiet trip into a bank vault, and the incriminating letter was now burned to ashes, floating through some Alaskan sewer drain.
With the letter gone, there was nothing to connect Dmitri Turov with the disaster in Barrow that had panicked the world, humiliated a U.S. president, caused massive expenditures, and left many dead, and the American Congress howling about secret U.S. military programs.
A big mystery that made the Yanks look stupid!
Ha!
He was watching a waiter approach carrying a large copper tray on which sat plates of baklava, and small cups of sweet coffee, when he noticed the front door of the restaurant open and immediately understood that the three men wearing dark suits—men who were not smiling, men whose eyes swept the tables, men whose walk was economic, military—were there because someone was in big trouble among the noisy patrons packing the restaurant.
Hmm, he thought, like a happy gossip. Who?
The men walked toward his table.
The angry man’s heartbeat sped up.
The lead man walked right up to the table and said, “You are Dmitri Turov, president of Dalsvix Group?”
It had to be a mistake. The leader produced a card identifying himself as Colonel Nicholas Azamat of the Federal Security Service, modern successor of the KGB, Russia’s equivalent to the American FBI’s National Security Branch, except in Russia, it reported directly to the president. Dmitri looked around for his bodyguards and saw that the table behind him was empty. His wife was gaping. She was not used to him being bossed around.
Dmitri told Colonel Azamat that there must be a mistake, but Azamat insisted that they all leave together. There wasn’t really an option to refuse.
Dmitri accompanied the men outside, and entered the back of their armored Mercedes G550. No one spoke. No one answered when Dmitri asked the cause of this visit.
He expected a ride into Moscow proper—where he’d confidently clear up whatever the problem was—but they left the city and rode beyond Moscow’s outer-ring road, and onto a newly constructed highway, northwest. Apartment buildings fell away. They passed woods on one side, farms on the other.
Colonel Azamat said, quietly, “Some people are very angry with you. They don’t mind what you did. They mind that you got caught. Now you have embarrassed them.”
Dmitri thought, It can’t be Alaska. No one knows!
Colonel Azamat said, “Now we must do some things to keep the Americans from releasing the story which would hurt us.”
Dmitri grabbed for the door handle, tried to struggle. But it was one thing to beat up a twenty-eight-year-old woman, and another to try to overcome four agents of the FSS. He hinted about offering money. He threatened their careers. He let them know that his cousin Natasha was close to the president.
At length they left the highway, and continued on a narrow, excellently maintained road through thick birch woods, and pulled through a spiked gate and into a walled compound with a sign identifying the four-story nineteenth-century structure ahead as a private clinic.
The escorts got him out of the car as easily as if they were moving a television. They force marched him across a white gravel driveway and up to the thick wooden doors and into what had probably been a duke’s country home once, then some prominent communist party member’s weekend dacha, and now, from the smell and white uniforms and hushed attitude of hurrying nurses, was some kind of clinic, all right.
The angry man began to shout for help.
Ten minutes later he was in a small, very well-lit, well-appointed operating room, clothes cut away, boxer underwear torn off, hairy ankles strapped in, like a monkey’s, his wrists restrained by manacles as well.
It was insane. They weren’t even asking questions. The suited men arrayed themselves in the corners of the room, and everyone just waited. Just fucking waited.
The angry man begged for a chance to explain. He begged to be interrogated. He begged for a lawyer. For a general he knew. For one of the president’s aides, a friend.
But the man who walked toward him in doctors’ scrubs was a stranger, tall, broad shouldered, and he moved with a slight limp, as if something was wrong with his left foot. As the doctor bent over him Dmitri tried to explain. Whatever was going on was an error. A fixable error.
The doctor just shook his head as if he had no idea what Dmitri was saying. Then, surprise, the words that he spoke came out in English.
Colonel Azamat materialized beside the doctor, and translated, in an efficient, unemotional voice.
“My name is Colonel Joseph Rush, of the United States Marines.”
What? The FSS had kidnapped him out of a restaurant and delivered him to an American? It was insane! It was an insult.
Colonel Azamat continued, “Despite the tension between our two nations, I am here thanks to the gracious cooperation of your president. My country is very grateful for this favor. But we are very angry at you.”
Dmitri Turov struggled, but the straps held him tight.
“You killed my fiancée. You almost started a war. You carried out an attack on our soil. In order to make this all go away, your people and mine made a deal. Included in this is that your company will not be making any medicines. Your company is being closed.”
Dmitri Turov was apoplectic.
The Marine watched as a Russian doctor produced a small syringe. At the sight, the angry man’s blood went cold.
Colonel Rush said, “I bet you can guess what this is.”
“You must not give that to me!”
Colonel Azamat translated as Colonel Rush said, “You’ll have a nice room. In the syringe is the rabies that your scientists modified in 1974, that your company took charge of later, and stored.”
The angry man had been prepared for pain. For hitting. For a steel rod. If he could hold out for a while he’d be rescued and things would be okay, for him, but not for Colonel Azamat, he’d told himself. But this was different. There was no way to stop the shiny long needle that was inserted into his arm, while he looked on, bulge-eyed.
He watched in horror as the plunger went down.
He watched the amber-colored liquid inside disappear.
There was a mild stinging in his arm, accompanied by some small heat. Then the needle was withdrawn.
The Marine said, “My president said I could ask him for anything. In the end, your people said okay, as long as they made the arrest and administered the shot. I am only permitted to watch. Favor for favor. To avoid worse.”
Joseph Rush removed his medical gown and let it drop to the floor, and then, one by one, everyone file
d out, to leave Dmitri on the table, shouting that they could not do this to him. Not him!
He awoke in a different room, an observation room, with padded walls and furniture, no window, high ceiling, a vent spewing forth lukewarm air that smelled of diesel fuel and cinnamon.
His shackles were off. There was a single cot. The steel door had a slot, through which, three times a day, healthy meals were delivered. He pounded on the walls. He begged someone for the antidote. He offered money. Whatever they wanted. A job. A car. A girl. A boy.
And every time he looked at the glass, the Marine was there, iron straight, emotionless. He never seemed to need sleep. He never moved in the big chair.
It took two days, then water began to taste funny.
Then the light started to hurt.
At the end, his screams were loud and hideous, and he barked like a dog and foamed at the mouth. No one heard him, because of soundproofed walls. On the far side of the thick glass sat the lone Marine, not eating, not drinking, just watching. Once, only once, Dmitri saw a tear roll down the man’s face. Other than that, the expression never changed.
After it was over, the Marine went home.
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