Gamma Blade

by Tim Stevens

  The background was a haze, a blur of movement. But just near the end of the six-second clip, something swung into view.

  “Hold on,” Venn said. “Stop it there. Go back a few frames.”

  Fuentes did so.

  “Freeze it.”

  Just above the boy’s right shoulder, and behind him, a flattened oval shape was visible. It was bifurcated horizontally by an indistinct line, which divided a dark half below from a lighter section above.

  Venn couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a porthole, with a line of sea-surface beyond it.

  “A ship,” he said. “Or a boat.”

  “Yes,” said Fuentes fiercely. It was the first time Venn had heard anything but fear or despair in the man’s tone. “I have looked at this clip over and over again, Mr Venn. I have studied every frame. And I am convinced that Hector is aboard a boat.”

  Venn glanced away, understanding.

  Fuentes nodded. “So, you see, when I first met you in the office, and I heard that you wanted to talk to Brull about a boat... I believed you could help me.”

  Venn studied him. “Why?” he said. “I could have been in cahoots with Brull. I might have been one of the men who was holding your son.”

  Fuentes shrugged awkwardly. “I cannot say why, exactly, I felt hope right then. But you looked to me... I don’t know. You looked to me, Mr Venn, like a man who was on the side of good. I thought maybe you were an undercover cop. Or a private investigator. And I admit, I was not being rational. There was no reason you mentioning a boat had anything to do with Hector’s disappearance.” He drew a long breath. “But I felt I had nothing to lose. I had just offered Brull the last thing I had. My life. My life, in exchange for my son’s. Of course, Brull laughed in my face. But I knew I had to approach you.”

  Estrada said, “You didn’t go to the police when you first learned your son had been taken?”

  “I could not, Detective,” Fuentes said. “If Brull heard the police were looking for the boy, and he surely would find out, he would kill him. And probably Helena, and our daughter Aletha. And me, though I do not care any longer.” Without warning, Fuentes seized Estrada’s arm. “Please. You cannot tell your department. They will post flyers with Hector’s photo all over the city. Brull will know at once -”

  “Calm down.” Estrada extracted her arm. “Like Detective Venn said, this is unofficial. We’ll tell nobody.”

  Fuentes looked at Venn again.

  “Will you help me?” he said.

  Venn thought about Brull. About the way the guy had sat there, behind his desk, a sleazy king in his crappy two-bit throne room, with the jewelry winking in his teeth.

  He thought about Beth, and the life growing within her. The life he’d helped to kickstart.

  He said, very slowly and carefully: “Carlos. I swear to you, on my mother’s grave, that I will get your son back to you.”

  Venn was aware of Estrada’s glance in his direction, but he didn’t return it. He kept his eyes focussed on Fuentes’.

  He saw, by the desperate hope in the bloodshot gaze, that Fuentes believed him.

  “Thank you,” the man whispered.

  Chapter 19

  The afternoon sessions of the conference were intense, far more so than the grandstanding morning lecture. By the close, at six pm, Beth was feeling wrung out, though intellectually stimulated and buzzing with new ideas.

  She milled with the others in the lobby outside the auditorium, discussing the talks they’d heard and participated in. She’d made several new contacts during the course of the day, with prominent research physicians across the country, and even a few from the UK and Scandinavia, and already she was mentally planning the coming week, when she’d schedule Skype calls and emails to them around her working days.

  The delegates began to disperse, gradually, many of them heading for the hotel bar to continue their discussions, others leaving for the airport, still more making for the elevators and their rooms to freshen up before the evening’s festivities.

  Beth had been invited to no fewer than four dinners at various locations around the city. With sincere regret, she’d turned every one of them down. This was the night she and Venn were going to spend together, their date night, and she didn’t want anything to get in the way of that. So she headed for their room, taking out her phone as she walked.

  She’d called Venn earlier, around lunchtime, after she’d seen the unconscious man, Harris, in the hospital. Venn had sounded distracted, though genuinely pleased to hear her voice. He’d been a little cagey, saying he’d looked around the city a little, but mostly had been hanging out with Estrada, the detective who’d interviewed them the night before. They’d been looking into one or two leads, he said.

  Beth knew there was more to it than that. But she knew, too, that if Venn was holding anything back, it was because it was better she didn’t know. He wasn’t a secretive man by nature, not when it came to their relationship. So she suspected he’d found out some stuff that she either wouldn’t like, or that might prejudice an investigation if she were told about it.

  Beth was fine with that. And she didn’t mind that Venn had gotten involved in the investigation. It was his nature. He was a cop, in his blood, and he couldn’t let go of something like what happened last night.

  She told him about the man in the hospital, James Harris, and his asking after her - or at least, after the woman - during his brief period of wakefulness. She told Venn, too, about the scars on the man’s body.

  “Huh,” he said. “This guy’s a real enigma.”

  “And he’s using a fake address on his driving license, too.”

  “The license itself is most likely fake,” said Venn. “I’ll get Estrada to check it out with the DMV. Thanks, Beth.”

  “No problem,” she said. “Anyhow... gotta get back to the conference.”

  “Okay. We still on for tonight?”

  “Of course,” she said happily.

  “Call me when you’re done, okay?” said Venn. “I’ll be somewhere near the hotel around six.

  And honey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Watch out for that guy, okay? Harris, or whoever he is. If he wakes up and asks for you again, don’t go there without calling me first.”

  “Venn, you don’t need to -”

  “I’m serious.” He sounded it. “This is bad stuff. I don’t know how this guy’s connected to it, but he may be dangerous. Keep away from him. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  *

  Now, on her way up to their hotel room, she called Venn.

  The call went to voicemail.

  Her phone rang as she was stretching out on the bed with her shoes kicked off, enjoying a few moments of relaxation.

  “Beth, sorry to miss you just now,” he said. “How’d it go?”

  “Great. Tell you about it over dinner. We still on?”

  “Yeah,” he said immediately. “But I’m on the other side of the city. Been doing some work with Estrada. I’m gonna be a little late - I’ll be here another half hour, and then it’ll take me like an hour to get back to the hotel.”

  Beth sat up. “No problem.” Then she had an idea. “Tell you what. I’ve been checking out restaurants online, and there’s this great place in . It’s a fifteen minute drive from here anyway. Why don’t we meet there, rather than you heading all the way back up here?”

  “Mmm.” Venn sounded doubtful. “I’m kind of in my day clothes right now.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “There’s no dress code at this place. Let’s just meet up there. Gives us a longer evening together.”

  “Ah, what the hell.” He sounded relieved at not having to wear a suit again. Besides, the knees of his suit trousers had been scuffed last night when he’d been forced to kneel in the alleyway. “Okay. Give me the address. I’ll get Estrada to drop me there. Say eight o’clock?”

  “Looking forward.” She blew a kiss down the phone.

  Beth f
reshened up, took a shower, and put on jeans and a light sweater and jacket. She headed down to the hotel’s parking lot and collected the Prius.

  She tended not to drive in Manhattan, and was out of practice negotiating the streets of a big city, but the GPS worked fine and she was soon on course to reach the restaurant. As she waited at a light, she thought the buildings around her looked a little familiar.

  Then she realized she was near the hospital, the one she’d visited that afternoon.

  Beth looked at the dashboard clock. Seven fifteen. Still forty-five minutes before she was meeting Venn.

  Venn had said to stay away from James Harris if he asked for her again. But she hadn’t had word that he’d asked for her.

  She was simply curious to see how he was doing.

  A brief visit couldn’t hurt.

  Before the lights changed, Beth quickly punched the hospital’s address into the GPS.

  Chapter 20

  The woman stopped, two paces from the bedside.

  He could reach her, no problem. But she was just too far away for him to retain the crucial element of surprise. And he’d get one chance at this, because if she knew he was making a move, she’d scream, and people would come running, and his opportunity would be lost.

  “You called me Harris,” he said.

  His voice felt old, croaky. Unused. He cleared his throat, felt a dry rasp of pain.

  The woman frowned slightly. “James Harris. Yes. That’s the name on your driving license.”

  Something stirred within the recesses of his mind.

  She said: “Don’t you remember? When you woke up the last time, they called you by that name, and you recognized it.”

  Information was flooding in, too rapidly and too chaotically for him to process. He said, “I’ve woken up before?”

  She looked perturbed. “For the first time, this morning. Then apparently, twice this afternoon. You stayed awake long enough the last time that they believed you were out of danger.”

  He grappled with this, but still couldn’t make sense of it. Instead, he said, “Who are you?”

  “Beth Colby.”

  “No. I remember that. I mean, what’s your connection with me?”

  “I’m a doctor,” she said. “But not one of the physicians here at the hospital. I’m visiting here. Last night you were attacked on the street, at the marina. I happened to be there. I gave first aid.”

  Her face, hovering before him. Last night.

  He gripped the shard of mirror beneath the blanket.

  She said, “Don’t you recall any of that?”

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  She smiled slightly. “It seems the first time you woke up, this morning, you asked for me. Well, not me, exactly. You said, where’s the woman? You seemed quite agitated.”

  He stared at her face. She looked gentle. Guileless.

  But that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  The blow on the head. Her face, before him.

  Above him.

  Did he have the sequence wrong? Had the blow come first, as she said? And then, when he saw her, was it because she was tending to his injury?

  Something else she’d said nagged at him. He groped back into his recent memory, trying to replay her words.

  “Tell me again,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Tell me what you just said. About when I was attacked.”

  “You were hit on the head. From behind. You suffered concussion -”

  “No,” he cut in. “Where did it happen?”

  “At the marina -”

  A thought, or an image, rather, loomed in his mind.

  A boat.

  The adrenaline surge was like a jolt from a cattle prod. He felt his pulse, his breathing, quicken.

  The woman’s, Colby’s, expression changed. “Are you okay?”

  And she took a step forward.

  He lunged, almost by reflex, his left hand seizing her wrist, the right coming out from under the blanket and bringing up the shard of glass, and as he yanked her down on top of him he held the tip of the makeshift knife where she could see it, close to her eye, and hissed: “Don’t scream.”

  *

  She was quick to react, which was to say, quick to grasp the danger she was in.

  He watched her frightened eye, inches from his. And he saw understanding there.

  She didn’t scream.

  He whispered, his lips close to her ear: “I really don’t want to hurt you. And I won’t. You have my word. But you don’t know me, so you don’t know if you can trust my word. It puts you in a bind.”

  Her eye was still fixed on his. There was a tinge of bewilderment there, mixed in with the fear.

  He whispered, very clearly so there’d be no misunderstanding, “I need you to help me get out of here.”

  To his surprise, she found her voice. She whispered back, a slight shakiness in her tone: “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “Yes, you can. There has to be a way.” He paused, listening. She’d said she was only visiting, which meant she probably wasn’t expected to be in with him long. Sooner or later, someone would notice the time she’d spent in this room. And in any case, one of the regular staff would no doubt check on him at any moment.

  He said, with more urgency: “Dr Colby, listen to me. I’m in danger. I can’t tell you about what went down last night, because I can’t recall all the details. But there are men who were there on the marina last night who want me dead. And who’ll stop at nothing to get to me. They may find me at any moment. And when they do, they won’t have scruples about collateral damage. They’ll kill anybody who gets in their way. Which means you’re in danger, too. You and everybody on this ward.”

  He stopped for an instant to make sure she was getting everything he was saying.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “You’re wondering why I don’t just give myself up to the police. Demand protection from them. And my answer is, I don’t know. I can’t recall. But I know, without understanding why, that I can’t tell the cops. That if I do that, I’ll open up a whole can of worms that will be impossible to close.”

  He listened again. Footsteps sounded, fast and hard, beyond the door. But they receded again. Somebody must have been running past.

  He lowered the glass shard a couple of inches.

  “So you need to get me out of here,” he said. “After I’m gone, you can call the cops. Set them after me. Whatever you like. But I need to be gone from here. For your sake. And for that of the hospital, and everybody in it. Do you understand?”

  He felt her head nod.

  “Okay. Now. What floor are we on?”

  She took a moment to reply. “The... third floor.”

  So going straight through the window wasn’t a realistic option.

  He said, “Are there any cops out there? On the ward?”

  He watched her eye.

  She murmured, “No.”

  He saw her pupil dilate. Saw the tiny contraction of her eyelids.

  She was lying.

  “Good. So here’s what we do,” he said. “I need you to go out there and bring a gurney in. Say you need to take me somewhere. For a scan, or something. Act like it’s urgent. If they try telling you that you don’t work here, pull rank on them. Tell them your credentials, that if they don’t listen to you I may die and that they’ll be held accountable. Whatever you can think of. Just get that gurney in here. Bring it in yourself.”

  She stared at him with her one visible eye.

  “You understand me?”

  She whispered, “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said, and let go her wrist. “Now go.”

  She sprang back so hard he thought she was going to lose her footing. She stared down at him for the briefest instant before turning and pushing through the door.

  It was an absurd plan, and she’d know it. But then, he was assuming she thought he was deranged.

  He was banking
on her not going through with it. Hoping she’d do what any normal person would do in similar circumstances.

  He gripped the mirror shard beneath the blanket once more.

  Waited.

  Chapter 21

  Even as Beth let the door swing shut behind her, even as her mind screamed at her to run, yelling, down the ward, she forced herself to stay in control.

  Don’t lose it. Don’t panic the ward.

  She stared around her, at the normality of the environment, or at least what passed for normality in an acute hospital ward. Patients groaned and burbled from behind drawn curtains. Nurses bustled about. Doctors called for assistance.

  Her heart felt like it was trying to hammer free from her chest.

  She saw the orderly, the one she’d noticed that afternoon when she’d last visited, at the far end of the ward.

  The one she’d identified as a cop.

  He was pulling off the difficult feat of making himself look as if he was busy, while doing nothing purposeful at all. He appeared to be wrestling with the brakes on a stretcher, applying them and disengaging them, then bending to peer at them as if they were stuck.

  Beth began to walk rapidly toward him.

  His cop’s sixth sense made him look up at her when she was ten paces away. She saw the wariness in his eyes.

  Beth came up close, and he straightened.

  She said, very low, very clear: “I know you’re a police officer. The man in side room five just threatened me with some kind of blade. He’s paranoid. He says there are men coming to kill him, and he wants me to help him get out of the hospital.”

  The cop reacted quickly, looking past Beth toward the door of the side room. He said, “You are?”

  “Dr Colby. I’m the physician who first treated him.”

  The cop said, “Stay here. Don’t say a word to anybody.”

  He began striding back up the ward, one hand moving inside his orderly’s scrubs, the other flipping open a cell phone. He muttered into it as he walked.

  Beth inhaled deeply, delayed shock hitting her.

  Venn. She needed to call Venn.

  She took out her own phone.

  A nurse appeared at her side. “Ma’am, you can’t use that in here. Please take it outside.”