Extreme Measures

by Michael Palmer

  He slipped around the railroad tie supports and ducked under the trailer. From that vantage, on his knees and elbows in the mud, he could make out only the lower half of the Saab. He wondered if Laura was inside. Five minutes passed with no movement from the car, and no sound other than the steady rumble of rain on the metal roof. Eric began to shiver from the inactivity. He grasped the neck of the whiskey bottle and was trying to formulate some sort of plan when the car door opened and closed. A man in a knee-length poncho stepped out into the downpour and approached the trailer. From his walk and the size of his boots, Eric could tell it was Dave.

  Eric edged to his left, and was nearly out from beneath the trailer when he was transfixed by the beam of a powerful flashlight.

  "Hey, amigo," Subarsky called out down the full length of the trailer,

  "how nice of you to be here to welcome us."

  Eric shielded his eyes against the glare.

  "Is Laura with you?" he shouted back.

  "She is, yes. But when I caught sight of you scampering around as we pulled in, I decided that perhaps I might do well to truss her up a bit.

  I assume you know by now that you weren't really supposed to be in any condition to get here."

  "Wheeler's dead."

  "So your beautiful friend here told me. Nice going, buddy. Damn fine work. I told him outthinking you wasn't going to be that easy, but he's always been an arrogant son of a bitch. He was arrogant when he busted me for dealing at M.I.T And then he was arrogant enough to suggest he become my business partner. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts he died arrogant too. "Give it up, Dave," Eric said.

  "now that I don't even have to split the profits with supercop?

  You can't be serious. I wish I could consider taking you on in his place. Caduceus and the Charity Project could still use a guy with your panache. But now I fear I just wouldn't ever be able to trust you."

  "What's the Charity Project?"

  The beam of light went off. In the seconds it took for Eric's eyes to adjust, it was shining on his face once again-this time from just a few feet away.

  "It's the key to the kingdom, that's what," Subarsky said.

  "DS-Nineteen-the drug that time and the fops in Washington forgot."

  "The DNA-bound antibiotic? I thought you gave up on that"

  "Oh, no, my friend. The shortsighted pawers-that be did. I always knew they were wrong, so I just stepped back and retooled. Put me together a quality team with vision, and set about making DS-Nineteen a reality.

  Now then, why don't you just wriggle on out here and we'll find someplace a little drier to continue our basic science seminar?"

  Without hesitating, Eric swung the bottle as hard as he could.

  The glass exploded against the flash, shattering its lens and bulb and sending it flying out of Subarsky's hand.

  "Hey, race move!" Subarsky cried. "But I thought you wanted to hear about my antibiotic."

  Eric had already spun around and scrambled out from under the trailer on the other side, He splashed back to the Saab. Laura, her mouth sealed beneath a broad piece of adhesive tape, stared out at him helplessly.

  She was lashed by her wrists to the steering wheel, and a single piece of rope across her throat pinned her back against the headrest. Eric was trying to kick in the passenger window when Subarsky stepped up beside him.

  "Please," he said, "don't do that. Don't do that. I have a five-hundred-dollar deductible that doesn't coven" Eric took a roundhouse swing at his face. Subarsky blocked it with his forearm, then cahnly shoved Eric backward at least ten feet and down into the mud.

  "I'm sorry this is happening, old friend," he said.

  "If I hadn't had to go back to my apartment to get these magic keys to use on that he-man lock over there, you would have missed us, and you wouldn't be nearly so muddy."

  Eric pushed himself to his feet. Subarsky circled around and cut him off it-from the road, but Eric knew he needn't have bothered. As long as Laura Enders remained the man's prisoner, he was never going to run.

  One way or the other, it was going to end right here.

  "Dave," he said, trying to stall until some idea, some flicker of an advantage came to him, "how can you hurt so many people just to develop a goddam drug?"

  "Hey, watch your tongue, fella. Use any delaviniz tactic you want. I like that, and I'd expect nothing less from you. But don't stoop to calling DS-Nineteen names. We're talking about a living antibiotic herean antibiotic that kills viruses and keeps killing them because it mutates as fast as they do."

  "It didn't work. That's why no agency would fund its development."

  "Didn't work in a test tube or a culture bottle," Subarsky corrected.

  "But tinker with it, tighten a nut here, a bolt there, and stick it into a living infected person, and whainmo! The field is suddenly bloody with little teeny virus corpses, including-we are about to — prove-the one that causes you-know-what.

  Impressed?"

  Eric squinted across at him and, in spite of himself, realized that he was impressed. The government grant agencies had clearly underestimated the man's genius. Faced with possibly the most lethal epidemic the world has ever known, they had blithely cast off one of the few scientists equal to the challenge "So," Eric said, "the tetrodotoxin was your tool for diverting no-next-of-kin patients to your place in Utah.

  Get 'em pronounced dead, and then get 'em out of town."

  I wish it were that simple. I tried using that doggone toxin in every way, shape, and form I could, but in the mind, only the houngans could do it right.

  Can you believe it? A PhD. in biochemistry from M.I.T, and I've had to imrort my stuff from a bunch of witch doctors."

  "Enter Rebeca darden."

  "Ah, you know about my little island princess too.

  Eric, you are really quite a guy. If you know, I assume ol' Haven knows as well."

  "Not yet, but I plan to tell him."

  Subarsky laughed merrily at Eric's bravado.

  "I wish you hadn't said that, pal, because now that makes you a real threat. You see, I don't think ol' Haven would approve of me.".

  "He wouldn't be in the minority."

  "Oh, stop it! Be witty or be silent."

  Eric glanced about for a board or rock, but saw nothing he could use.

  Behind Subarsky, traffic continued splashing along Meridian, but no one even slowed.

  A police cruiser was about the best he could hope for.

  He decided to continue stalling for as long as his adversary would allow.

  "So Rebecca Darden uws the contacts her father helped her make in Haiti, and gets the powder for you.

  Subarsky slapped a spray of water from his beard.

  "She does that, yes," he said. "But mostly she uses her contacts to get cocaine for me and Lester to sell. Cocaine and some of the best poppy this side of Istanbul. How in the hell else was I going to finance tim my work? Lester and I tried doing it for a e with weapons, but as our operation's grown, we just haven't been able to generate enough business to meet our overhead. So we decided to diversify. We haven't abandoned the weapons business, but cocaine is much easier to handle than Uzi semiautomatics, know what I mean? Damn sight better markup, too."

  "Jesus, David, you are sick. How did you make a thug like Wheeler understand something as complex as DS-Nineteen?"

  "Simple," Subarsky said. "I just told him that the real name of the drug was Money. Once it's perfected, we bargain for amnesty if we need to, and then name our price-as in eight zeros; maybe even nine.

  Oil Lester understood that kind of science. Believe me he did.

  "So we skim enough from our business endeavors to maintain life and limb, and keep sweet Rebecca in shoes, and then we throw the rest into the project.

  The way things are going out in Charity, another year, maybe two is all it's gonna take."

  "I don't believe it."

  "Frankly, Eric, I'm very ticked off at you, so I don't really give a damn what you believe. Th
ings were going mighty smoothly until your friend in there showed up and turned your head. Now, with most of my teammates gone, we may have to consider a relocation-whole new players, and even a new base hospital." He sighed theatrically. "Still, I have managed to salt enough away to take Rebecca on a sabbatical if I find I must."

  "You are really sad, David."

  "You're damn right I am," Subarsky shot back, his tone suddenly much harsher. "I'm sad because thanks to you, I may have to retool again.

  And I'm sad because I'm getting soaked and catching a chill standing here talking to an old pal from Watertown who doomed himself by being too goddam smart for his own good."

  He reached his long arms up like an attacking grizzley, and took a step forward.

  "Now," he said, "since the lovely Laura over there is absolutely positive that a certain video is locked in that trailer, and since the well-known chap buying poppy and blow from us on that tape is waiting to reward me handsomely for it, suppose you just let me-Head down, Eric charged the man, hurling himself through the rain at his chest, flailing with his fists at Subarsky's face. Subarsky stumbled backward. En'c lashed out again, connecting solidly with his cheek.

  Then Subarsky reached out and effortlessly shoved him back to the ground.

  "Happy now?" he said. "Is it out of your system?"

  Eric looked up. He had hit the man with everything he had, yet Subarsky was merely standing there, licking at a small tear in his lower lip and smiling at him through his beard. Eric tried another onslaught, but the advantage of surprise was gone. Subarsky grabbed him by the front of his jacket and slammed him against the trailer as if he were weightless.

  Eric's head snapped against the metal door.

  His arms and legs instantly went limp, and he dropped into a muddy puddle. Before he could fight through the dizziness to react again, Subarsky was on him. Kneeling on his back, he pulled Eric's arms behind him and tied them with a short length of clothesline. Then he knelt heavily on the back of Eric's thighs, and tied his ankles with similar quickness and.

  "AD right, then," he said, making no effort to ron Eric over or remove him from the puddle. "There being no further objections, I move we take out the magic key set and find the one that fits this Bozo lock.

  Do I hear a second?"

  "David, don't hurt us," Eric said, rolling onto his side. "It won't help anything to hurt us."

  "Says you," Subarsky mumbled, peering through the downpour as he sorted through a sophisticated-looking ring of keys and oddly bent wires. "Why, just wrecking my flashlight the way you did carries the goddam death penalty."

  "David, please…"

  "Now just shut up, little fella. Sit back in your puddle, enjoy the last few moments of your earthbound existence, and watch a master locksman at work. Believe it or not, these beauties were made by one of the engineering students at M.I.T He sold them for a thousand bucks a set, and was ready to retire by the time he graduated. There's nothing they can't open."

  He selected one of the keys, examined it, and then gently inserted it into the opening at the base of the padlock. Although there was a brand name of some sort die-stamped onto the oddly shaped padlock, it had become known around Plan B as the Scottlock, out of deference to Scott Enders, who had designed it. The actual keyhole was well concealed beneath a small sliding panel at the top of the apparatus.

  The keyhole at the bottom was another piece of business altogether.

  As Dave Subarsky worked the key he had selected in up to its hilt, the metal tip completed an electrical circuit between a tiny lithium battery and a wire-enclosed plastic capsule. In seconds the heat from the wire had melted the plastic, releasing a single large drop of concentrated hydrochloric acid.

  Subarsky was dramatically humming a fragment of Bach's Concerto No. 2 in E, and gently jiggling the key, when the hydrochloric acid first touched the wad of chemically treated plastique explosive wadded into the base of the lock. He was bending over, peering at the keyhole, when the apparatus exploded.

  Eric watched in stunned horror as, in an instant, both of Subarsky's hands and a good portion of his face were blown away.

  Bellowing insanely, pawing at the remains of his eyes, he stumbled backward. He was still on his feet after absorbing a blast powerful enough to have actually blown a large hole in the metal door.

  Eric rolled over in time to see Subarsky, still shrieking incoherently, reel blindly past the Saab and onto Meridian Avenue. The driver of the oncoming sixteen-wheeler, high on cocaine he had bought from a dealer in Cambridge, never saw the figure lurch out of the shadows and onto the road; nor did he feel the impact when the reinforced steel grille-guard of the truck slammed into the man full force.

  What remained of the genius biochemist's right arm became entangled in the metal grate as the semi roared on through the rain.

  The young driver, immersed in a Guns and Roses tape, sang along as he drove, unaware of the huge, grotesque ornament suspended just below the Mack bull dog on his hood.

  Fighting the rain and a sudden profound exhaustion, Eric took nearly fifteen minutes to work free of his bonds. Then, using a rock, he smashed in the passenger window of the Saab. A minute later, he and Laura were inside the trailer. The video receiver was on a crate in the front left corner. It was enclosed in an oilskin sack, and its wire antenna had been brought out through a tiny hole drilled in the trailer wall.

  "Here," Eric said, handing the tape over. "I think you should be the one to Turn this in."

  "That lock was the second time today that Scott's saved my life," Laura said.

  They huddled together in the it" eras she told him about finding her brother, their subsequent capture and escape, and Scott's death.

  She eluded Lester Wheeler and his men by swimming underwater from one pier to the next. Finally, nearly unconscious from the cold, she had stumbled up the bank and onto the roadway. An elderly woman and her husband, on their way home from the market, had picked her up and brought her to their home.

  "I've got a bit of a story to tell you, too," Eric said, "but unless I get some dry clothes on soon, I may end up getting pneumonia and being taken to White Memorial Hospital. And we all know what happens to people who are brought there."

  "Not anymore it doesn't," Laura said. She jumped off the trailer and helped him to follow.

  EPILOGUE

  The ten-seat Leariet swooped down through the cloudless midmorning sky like a falcon, leveling off sharply at 2,000 feet. Inside the cabin, five passengers pressed their foreheads against the windows and peered through the glare across the stark San Rafael Desert, each one anxious to catch a first glimpse of Charity, Utah.

  "We've sighted the town, Mr. Harten," the pilot said over the intercom.

  "About five miles ahead at ten o'clock. We've been cleared into Moab, so if it's okay with you, I'll make a couple of passes at this altitude and then head over to the airport."

  Within three hours of receiving Laura's call at his home in Laurel, Virginia, the head of Communigistics International had the government-owned jet on the ground at Boston's Logan Airport. By 7:30 A.M. the Lear was airborne once again, streaking west. Sharing the cabin with Neil Harten were an associate of his from Plan B named Thorsen, plus Eric, Laura, and Maggie Nelson.

  Twenty-five hundred miles away, they knew, Bernard Nelson lay unconscious, hooked to a ventilator in the intensive care unit of the hospital in Utah. And from what Eric had learned from his conversation with the attending physician, the detective's condition was not good.

  Their odyssey had begun with an early-morning phone call to Maggie Nelson from a man named Smith in Moab. From what she could tell, her husband had succeeded in finding and penetrating the facility at Charity, Utah, only to be poisoned by the head of the operation there, a physician named Barber. Details of Nelson's subsequent rescue by a Charity employee named Pike were sketchy, but apparently Barber had been shot and wounded in the process, and another employee killed.

  Although he was conscious w
hen the ambulance arrived at the town, during the ride to Moab, Bernard had slipped into a coma.

  Maggie Nelson's first move had been to call Laura at Bernard's Boston apartment.Now, the travelers stared down in awed silence at the fantastic scene below. The town, barely a smudge on the massive landscape, was surrounded by police cruisers and ambulances. Dozens of people were milling about along the single main street. Others lay on stretchers outside a low cinder-block building.

  The pilot made two wide swings overhead, giving those on each side of the aircraft a good look. Then he banked to the east and shot across the rugged desert toward Moab. Seated next to Gil Harten at the rear of the plane, Eric briefed him on what he knew of the poison tetrodotoxin.

  With the intervention of Haven Darden, the hospital administration had allowed Eric to search the offices of Dave Subarsky and Norma Cullinet.

  In a locked box in the nurse's desk, he found a number of ampules of intravenous adrenaline. He also retrieved two of what appeared to be baby-food jars, each about half-filled with a coarse grayish powder. One had a small stick-on label reading simply "T."; and the other, D.

  When confronted with the find, and a brief explanation of his daughter's role in the Charity Project, Haven Darden picked up the phone and asked Eric to wait in the corridor outside his hospital room.

  After just a few minutes, he called him back inside.

  "My daughter says that the powder labeled 'T' is what we suspected," he said. There was great sadness in his eyes, but also undisguised relief in his voice that Rebecca had agreed to cooperate.

  "The other is some sort of substance to reverse the effects of the toxin. Rebecca says that the dose of the antidote is between two and five grams, and that her cohorts had been dissolving it in saline and administering it intravenously. They also used large doses of adrenaline, but she has no idea of the amount. Most of the work was done in the monitoring room at the mortuary.

  Later this morning, she has agreed to go with my wife and our attorney to the police."

  "I'm sorry you and your wife have to go through this, sir," Eric said.