The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  She recalled how she had used that very expression with that nice old public defender just the other day in the ER. “You mean, you want me to come by right now?”

  “Do you live nearby?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Can you be here at one thirty?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “Good. Do you know the floor? I can meet you at the elevator bank.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Now, I’m not sure how I can help you. But I’ll show you around. Show you the sorts of things we do.”

  “That would be wonderful,” she told him, and then she thanked him and hung up.

  She was about to slip her phone into the back pocket of her jeans, but stopped herself. She called Ken Sarafian. When something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Whatever Austin had been up to had gotten him killed.

  “And so you’re going to the labs right now?” Ken asked her. “Think that’s wise?”

  “No. That’s why I wanted to be sure that someone knew I was there.”

  “You’re scared.”

  “A little.”

  “That’s good. You should be scared. Which is why I’m going to go with you.”

  Had she been hoping he would offer? She suspected so, but until that second, she hadn’t admitted this to herself.

  “Ken—”

  “Save your breath, Alexis. I’m joining you. What time are you seeing Sinclair?”

  “One thirty.”

  “So, I’ll meet you outside the hospital at one twenty.”

  “Not the main entrance,” she said, aware of how grateful she was. She told him where the doors were for the wing with the administrative offices and the labs.

  “One more thing,” she added.

  “Yes?”

  “Sally Gleason. There’s a photo of her and the Vietnamese food chemist on Facebook.”

  “So, she’s the link.” He sounded sad. Disappointed. For a moment Alexis was surprised by his reaction, but then she recalled the connection: Sally Gleason was the daughter of a friend of his who had passed away.

  “Or a link,” she added quickly. “We don’t know whether she’s working with Webber—”

  “Or whether she’s his competitor,” he said, already resolute and focused, and finishing her sentence for her.

  Before leaving, she went to the dresser and opened the drawer with all of her socks and pulled out her cutting kit. She unzipped the airline amenities bag and removed the scalpel. It had a plastic safety guard covering the blade. For now, she’d keep the guard on the metal. For now. She placed it into the back of her jeans, right beside her phone.

  And then she grabbed two of Austin’s energy gels she’d brought back from Vietnam and tossed one into her purse. She ripped open the top of the other. It was chocolate, a flavor she loathed, but she needed a boost and figured, what the hell, and squirted the goo into her mouth. It tasted even worse than she remembered—nothing like chocolate at all.

  34

  Douglas stood beside Wilbur Sinclair, focused and resolved. He sniffed the air, which even here, the elevator bank outside the entrance to the labs, smelled of chemicals and cleansers. His gaze moved back and forth between the view of the East River from the wide windows and the doors to the two elevators.

  “And there are no cameras here?” he asked Sinclair again. He had asked him this before coming, but felt the need to inquire once more. To be reassured that there was no video record of his presence. He tried not to scowl, but his patience was at an end.

  The scientist had his hands clasped behind his back. He was wearing a white lab coat that seemed to have more pockets than a pair of cargo pants. He had a key card in a lanyard around his neck, and in one hand he was holding a capped syringe of propofol. He shook his head, which had small beads of sweat just above his eyebrows, and pointed at the doors behind them. Sinclair was a man with lips the color of liver and a cleft in his chin that was a chasm. His weekend stubble was white and his sideburns were going gray, but he had hair that was otherwise still mostly glossy and black.

  “The first camera is on the other side of the door. The real entrance to the labs,” he answered.

  Douglas presumed Sinclair was sweating because he was frightened. His face was flushed. For a guy who spent his days with the plague—a new plague—he was clearly a little shaky when it came to murder.

  “As long as you don’t enter the labs, no one will ever know you were here,” he added. Still, Sinclair had suggested just making the ER doctor disappear. Carving her up and putting the pieces into the pathological waste incinerator. “It’s big enough for primates,” he’d said helpfully. “Couldn’t we just turn her to ash?”

  Douglas had to disabuse him of the notion that this was even a remotely good idea. Here he had always presumed that scientists were orderly people. Clean freaks. Good God, they worried about how they treated their rats and mice before they gave them cancer or ALS or, in this fellow’s case, the plague. They insisted on humane protocols.

  But they most certainly could not just make Alexis disappear. Not after Harper’s death. Not after she’d brought in a PI who clearly knew what he was doing. She had to die, but it had to pass the forensic sniff test and look like a suicide.

  Douglas supposed that when Alexis saw him, she would recognize him instantly from the night he and Austin had come to the ER. And that was fine. In that moment when recognition froze her, Sinclair would uncap the syringe and plunge it into her neck. She wouldn’t collapse instantly; they only did that in the movies. But propofol worked fast. Douglas would wrap her in a bear hug, his arms enfolding her like a straitjacket, ensuring that she didn’t bruise herself. When she was unconscious, they would get back into the elevator and bring her to Oscar’s office in advancement. There were no cameras anywhere on that floor and no one would be working—unlike the labs, where at the very least there would be an assistant stopping by later to tend to the animals, and Sinclair had said he’d be shocked if one young researcher or another didn’t appear at some point in the afternoon.

  Then, after dark, Alexis Remnick would quite literally cut herself to death. Austin had told him that once upon a time she’d been a cutter. (After he’d gotten over the raised, wormlike scars on her abdomen and thighs, he’d even admitted that he’d found her vulnerability rather attractive.) Cutters didn’t usually kill themselves, that wasn’t the point of it. But they also didn’t lose their boyfriends to hit-and-run accidents in Vietnam and then discover their boyfriends were liars. After dark, Webber and Sinclair would slash her wrists and throw her into the East River as she was bleeding out. She’d probably wake up when she started to breathe in the water, but not enough that she’d be able to fight it. And if she did? Already she’d be far too weak from blood loss to swim and climb out. She’d drown. It was fail-safe.

  And this really was the only solution. His intuition had always been sound. It was a hunch, after all, that had led him to follow Austin to Vietnam in the first place. And he’d been right. There had been a lot to contain.

  While they waited, mostly but not entirely in silence, he swiped right on his phone to see the news. He was just killing time. When he did, however, his eyes narrowed and he turned away from Sinclair. All, for a brief second, was forgotten. Some energy gel company had announced a recall because they feared product tampering. A packet had been opened in Da Nang, Vietnam, and some lab tech was dead. Some cabdriver was dead. Douglas wasn’t quite sure what the hell an energy gel was and Googled it. He stared at the images on the company’s website. He saw what looked like a mayonnaise packet you were given at the sort of deli shop too lazy to spread condiments on bread. He saw photos of cyclists and runners squeezing the shit into their mouths.

  And he knew. He knew precisely how that stupid fuck Austin Harper had brought the pathogen to Vietnam—and it was possible, Douglas
realized, that he’d flown all the way there after him and had four people killed, including the idiot American, and still he’d contained nothing. Nothing at all.

  The FBI would link Harper to the university labs at the hospital. How could they not? Even if they didn’t know for a fact that the pathogen had been created on this very floor, here was where they’d begin. The proximity was obvious. For all Douglas knew, they were going to be here today. They might be gathering right now.

  And someone had clearly helped Austin, because on his own he sure as hell couldn’t have taken the pathogen and placed it into an energy gel.

  Sinclair.

  Had Wilbur Sinclair betrayed him, too?

  He placed his hand inside his jacket and unclipped the safety on his Glock. He might have shot the scientist right there, left him dead on the floor, but he heard the ping of the elevator, a chime that woke him. He looked up and saw Alexis Remnick emerge and Sinclair uncapping the syringe, but then the scientist stopped and dropped his arm to his side, his hand shielding the needle from the woman’s eyes. Beside her was that pain-in-the-ass detective, Ken Sarafian.

  * * *

  . . .

  Ken saw the two of them, his mind registering that the fellow beside Douglas Webber was one of the scientists here—no doubt, Wilbur Sinclair—and he had something in his hand, and that Webber was reaching for his pistol. And so Ken drew his gun from his shoulder holster, but it was already too late. Webber fired, and the bullet hit him hard in the arm, splintering the bone just above his wrist. He dropped his gun as he grimaced, grunting against the pain, understanding that he was still alive because his forearm had been in front of his chest. In front of his heart. He fell to his knees to retrieve the weapon, but it was too late.

  “Don’t go there,” Webber was saying, and then he was lifting the gun off the tile floor and dropping it into his coat pocket, the guy’s own Glock pointing down at him. Alexis was flat against the wall between the elevators, the doors now shut, and the scientist in the lab coat looked a little sickened.

  But then, so did Alexis. Hadn’t she said she thought she was coming down with something as they’d gotten into the elevator just a moment ago? Something about the nearness of flu season and how she’d have to get her shot in the next week or two?

  “I thought she was coming alone,” Sinclair was telling Webber. He sounded panicked and desperate. “What do we do with him? With her?”

  “You,” Webber was saying to him, and it wasn’t a question.

  “Me? What, Douglas?”

  “You gave Harper the pathogen. The red lotus. You put it in an energy gel.”

  “What are you talking about? I never gave him anything. I don’t even know what that is—an energy gel.”

  Ken watched as Webber looked back and forth between the scientist and Alexis, and then settled his gaze upon Sinclair. On the one hand, it had all happened so fast, just the way it did in the jungle in Vietnam or one time when they were storming a crack house on Avenue A or another time when a shooter was holed up in a real estate company’s office and the guy was furious about…about something. Some way he felt he had been deceived. Ripped off. And suddenly that fellow was shooting, too. But it was also happening slowly, in moments of incremental and quixotic quiet. The way Webber was ignoring the scientist, the way Alexis was now kneeling beside him. His arm hurt like hell, pain that deadened sound at the same time that it caused him to see klieg lights behind his eyes every time he blinked. Like a puppy with a wounded paw, he let the doctor look at his arm. Webber didn’t seem prepared to fire again. The guy might kill him yet—he’d meant to kill him a moment ago, an instinct when he’d seen a man reaching for a gun—but Ken wasn’t absolutely convinced that it was going to end here on the floor at the entrance to the labs.

  “Can you stop the bleeding without bringing him to the ER?” Webber was asking Alexis.

  Ken looked down at the blood that was spreading along the sleeve of his olive peacoat from the elbow to the cuff, and puddling in his lap. Alexis was feverish and pale. He had another of those flashbacks: his one Christmas at the base in Quang Tri. The commander had wanted a Christmas tree, and so he’d managed to have one flown in from his home state of Michigan. By the time it arrived in Vietnam, it was largely needleless and made that classic Charlie Brown tree look like the monolith at Rockefeller Center. Still, they’d put it on a stand not far from the tank farm and someone had found some tinsel. But then the monsoon came. The water was knee-high at the base, and when they weren’t swatting with shovels at the rats that suddenly were swimming all around them, they were trying to retrieve the tree as it floated away. And it was then that the winds took whole rows of plywood that they had belted down and ripped them from their moorings. The sheets were flying through the air like playing cards, and two of them sliced into a soldier named Powell like table saw blades. Ken couldn’t recall the guy’s first name now. But he dragged him out of the water and into the nearest hut, radioed the base hospital, and found a medic, a kid with Mr. Magoo eyeglasses. There they used a pair of scissors to snip through Powell’s sopping camo pants as the soldier cried over and over, “My leg, my leg, no, no, not my leg,” and Ken had thought to himself, Better your damn leg than your stomach or your head. But he hadn’t said that. He’d simply done whatever the medic had told him to do. He honestly believed the guy was going to be okay. But then he saw the gash the size of his boot above the guy’s knee, an alluvium maw of tissue and muscle and bone, all of it awash in blood that was pooling—no, it was streaming, pumping, it was a garden hose that wasn’t going to cease until Powell was dead—and he knew he was mistaken and reflexively turned away. When he looked back at the soldier, already the guy was fading. He had stopped speaking and the light was leaving his eyes, and the medic was tying a tourniquet at the very top of the soldier’s leg, near his groin. He could hear a couple of corpsmen pounding their way through the water to them, but it was too late. Powell would be dead by the time they brought him to the hospital. He’d been killed by flying plywood while shoveling rats in a monsoon. That about said it all. His skin was the color of milkweed.

  Very much, Ken realized, like this ER doctor’s was right now.

  “Let me take off his coat so I can look at it. I doubt I can do much if you don’t let me take him to the ER,” she was saying to Webber.

  “No ER,” the guy said. “Not happening.” But Webber didn’t stop her from extricating his left arm from the coat and then yanking the sleeve off his right—just ripping off the Band-Aid. He gazed down at his shirt, a black turtleneck—but much blacker where it was saturated between his elbow and his wrist. The wound didn’t look so terrible, he thought, when the tsunami of pain, which had come when Alexis had pulled off the coat, had subsided. This wasn’t the river of blood he was expecting. It was bleeding, yes, but it was starting to slow. He could see that. It was clean.

  “I know that hurt. I’m sorry, I didn’t have any scissors,” she said. Then she reiterated that he needed to be downstairs in the ER. “The bone’s shattered. We need an orthopedist—he needs an orthopedist,” she was saying. She took off her jean jacket and pressed it against the wound, and he inhaled deeply against the sting.

  Webber seemed to think about this, but he didn’t react. He turned to the scientist and said, “Get the rats.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Transgenic. Red lotus.”

  “With the plague?”

  “Yes, damn it! Be fast and come back here.”

  Sinclair paused and Ken wondered if he might disobey him. But the moment was brief: the fellow was making some sort of calculus in his mind about, Ken assumed, how many rats he could carry. He held up a syringe. “And this?”

  “No. Just go.”

  And then Sinclair was pulling a key card from a lanyard and pressing it against the door that led to the labs, buzzing it open, and he was gone.

 
“You two, up!” Webber barked at them.

  “Can you stand?” Alexis asked him.

  Ken nodded. He could. She was wearing a T-shirt, and now he could see the sores on her arms. She was sweating and looked sickly. Whatever she had, he thought, it really had come on fast.

  At first, I thought it really was just a hit-and-run. An accident. A horrible coincidence.

  It was only a few days later, when I heard about the lab in Vietnam, that I got scared. Someone had the same idea that I did. That we did.

  But I still thought we might be okay. Do nothing—nothing more—lie low, and it would all go away. It was only when Sara told me Austin’s girlfriend had approached her that I realized that wasn’t happening. And then Ken told me he had done exactly the opposite of what I had asked, and I knew for sure the walls were closing in. And it was all because of that ER doctor. She was like a dog with a bone.

  35

  Was it an urban legend? Maybe.

  But every ER doc in New York City had heard the story of Noah Snow. It was a Saturday night (of course) one summer in the late 1970s, and the Bronx ER where Snow worked as a physician was a madhouse. He was treating a young thug who’d been shot in the stomach. And two guys appeared in the cubicle—preceded by the shouts and screams of the other patients and a couple of terrified orderlies—with a pair of sawed-off shotguns to finish off the kid with the bullet in his abdomen. And Snow, who always carried with him a .45 pistol as well as his stethoscope because the neighborhood was so damn dicey, pulled it out and plugged both dudes by the curtain where they stood. Two shots.

  First do no harm? Alexis knew that if she wanted to live and keep this old PI alive, she had to remove the safety guard from the scalpel in her back pocket. And she was going to have to do some serious harm: swipe hard and fast against Douglas Webber’s carotid artery. He’d be unconscious in seconds, literally seconds, and would be gone soon after that. But she’d have to do it without getting shot first.