Crescendo Of Fire

by Marc Stiegler

  The Captain looked at her, disturbed, then looked back at Lenora. "What did you do to me?"

  Lenora stepped back and gave him a smug smile. "What difference does it make? My daughter's right, you know. Just get with the program. It'll all be all right." Nodding goodbye to Jam, she wrapped her hands around one of his arms while her daughter wrapped her hands around the other. "I promise."

  As Jack allowed the women to walk him to his doom, he wondered what test they had him in the middle of right now. Was he passing? Or failing? His thoughts were not calmed by the realization that the answer was surely "both."

  Jam sat in the observation room, shivering ever so slightly with unused adrenalin, watching Ciara and Lenora lead the captain away. “This is not acceptable,” she muttered to herself. Her BFF’s words rose unbidden to her lips. “It must be improved upon.” Listening as this insistent thought echoed in her mind, she brightened. Of course. She pulled out her cell phone. “This will be improved upon.”

  10

  RADIOACTIVE

  The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

  --Tony Hoare

  Dmitri could no longer decide which he hated more, going to the bathroom to pee or taking the tablets Dash demanded he ingest every four hours throughout the day. He supposed he hated going to the bathroom more, because his fingers trembled a bit as he took the urine sample to put it in the beta radiation detector. The trembling invariably caused him to make a mess of the process. Urine everywhere.

  Moreover, the trembling was not caused by his fear of finding radiation. Rather, the trembling was caused by the pills. Intellectually, he understood that he should hate taking the pills because they were the cause of the trembling that caused the problem with the urine. His emotional reaction, however, led him to hate the moment when the consequences came into play. When he was in the bathroom. Turning philosophical for a moment, he realized that much of the troubled history of mankind was a consequence of similar emotional overrides of intellectual understanding.

  Of course, the trembling fingers were not the only symptom of the chelating agents poisoning his bloodstream. He usually felt a strong desire to vomit about an hour after taking the pills. All in all, he just wished the Premier would hurry up and poison him and be done with it.

  He finally got the urine soaked pad into the device. It promptly set off a wailing alarm and started blinking a red light, fast and furious. At that moment Dmitri realized he had been kidding himself. In reality, he would have much preferred for the Premier to take his time about killing him.

  He lay in the bed hooked to dozens of sensors as activity swept around him. Dmitri asked the question of no one in particular, “So, do I have a chance?”

  Both Chance and Dash paused in their frenetic dance with the machine that had just been wheeled into the room. It was not like any machine he’d ever seen before. He suspected this was the special machine for which he’d paid the development costs. Dash answered him first. “Of course you have a chance, Dmitri. I have not spent the past weeks poisoning you with chelating agents for the fun of it.”

  Chance interrupted, “Oh, Dash, be honest now. You’ve had some fun poisoning Dmitri, at least a little bit.”

  Dash pursed her lips. “Not very much.”

  Chance pulled a cluster of thin tubes from the new machine as Dash wheeled it into position beside him. Chance waved the tubes, each with a shiny long needle at the end, in front of him. “So we made this, the vampire filter, just for you. We’re going to stick needles into each of your major arteries and flush your blood through the system as fast as we can, filtering out both the chelating agents and the polonium as fast as we can pump.” She turned to her companion. “Dash, I’ll let you give Dmitri the bad news.”

  Dash rolled her eyes. She placed a hand on Dmitri’s shoulder. “I am very sorry. This is going to hurt a great deal.”

  Dmitri’s eyes went wide. “Couldn’t you—“ he grunted as Chance slid the first needle home. “Couldn’t you—“ Dash slid in the next needle.

  It took all his concentration not to jump as if zapped by electrodes as the women hooked him up to the vampire.

  Dash spoke apologetically. “I would anesthetize you, but with the filter running at full speed, flushing your blood clean, it would be quite ineffective.”

  Chance chimed in, “And besides, she’s enjoying this. At least a little bit.” Dash glared at her.

  The vampire went to work, and Dmitri watched his life’s blood drain from every part of his body at the same time. He felt lightheaded.

  Chance frowned. “Oh, that’s not good.”

  Dash pursed her lips again. “I told you it needed more testing.”

  Chance looked at Dmitri and explained, “We don’t seem to be able to pump the blood back into you as fast as we’re pulling it out. It should be okay though. If you pass out, there’s no need for you to feel any anxiety.”

  Dash shook her head. A few moments later, she pressed the button, and the whir of the machine changed. “Okay. We are done for the moment. You should be feeling better any time now.”

  Dmitri nodded. “I don’t feel faint anymore. I guess I have most of my blood back again?”

  Both women were watching the readouts on the vampire too closely to pay attention. Finally, the machine stopped making any noise at all. Chance spoke. “That’s it.”

  Dmitri smiled. “That’s it? We’re done? Great!”

  Dash shook her head. “I am afraid this is only the beginning.”

  For the first time, Chance also spoke with sorrow. “Dash is right. We won’t really know we’re done until we know we’re done. We’re breaking new ground here. You’ll go down in the history books.” She paused. “One way or the other.”

  Dmitri gave them a weak smile. “Could we at least take out those needles? Quickly, perhaps?”

  Dash responded mournfully, “I am sorry. We will have to do this again in about half an hour, to see how much of the polonium we can get as it’s excreted from the cells.” She closed her eyes. “And then we’ll see how much damage the polonium has done to you in the brief time it was in your system before we extracted it.” She paused. “So we need to leave the needles in.”

  Dmitri responded with proper Russian philosophy. “Well, it’s not as bad as simply dying. The pain reminds you that you’re still alive.”

  Wolf brought Aar along with him to the gangway from the Dreams Come True to the Haven. He was looking for Dash since the dispatcher had told him that she had requested him. Wolf was eager to see her again since they’d had so much fun together the first time. But the woman they found wearing the white lab coat was too tall to be Dash.

  As they walked up to her, she turned to them and smiled. “Hi. I’m Chance. You must be Wolf and Aar. Dash told me how you’d helped her after she left us on Dmitri’s yacht. She thought you could help me find the assassin who tried to murder our current patient.”

  Aar’s eyes widened. “Is your patient all right?”

  Chance waved a hand in a gesture of uncertainty. “Not clear yet. It’s still a coin flip.”

  Wolf smacked his left fist into his right palm. “Dash is living up to her reputation of getting people into exciting situations. Do you know who the assassin is? Can we just take him, or do we have to figure out who he is first?”

  Chance pulled an instrument from her pocket. “First we have to find him. But I expect that might not to be a problem.”

  Chance led them through the Haven to Dmitri’s suite with the confident stride of someone who knew where she was going and had been there many times before.

  As they hustled, Aar commented with puzzlement, “didn’t this guy try to kidnap you and Dash? It is the same guy, right?”

  Chance acknowledged this. “Yeah, but we worked it out. Now we’re business partners.”

  Wolf chortled. “Only on the BrainTrust.” More seriously, he continued, “So you said it wouldn’t be a problem finding the perp. But you don’t know who it is y
et, which suggests you don’t have any useful video of the attack. Do you have a trick up your sleeve, or are you simply a next-generation Sherlock Holmes?” He pointed at the slim little gadget in her hand. “Does it have to do with that?”

  Chance nodded. “It certainly does.” She tapped the device. “This is a very sensitive beta radiation detector. Dmitri was poisoned with polonium.”

  Wolf grunted. “So the Russian Union Premier is at it again.”

  “We presume so,” Chance responded. “Anyway, properly contained polonium is virtually impossible to detect. But once you pull it out of the bottle to use it, you inevitably leak enough residue to create a radioactive trail.”

  They reached Mikhailov's dwelling. The door was locked but Chance swept through unhindered, causing Wolf to raise an eyebrow.

  Yefim and Gleb were both in the entryway living room, pacing with anxiety. Gleb was the first to ask, “how is our boss? Will he be okay?”

  Chance spoke cheerfully. “Oh, he’s fine. You know, he asked Dash specifically if she could save him from polonium poisoning while we were in mediation.”

  Aar laughed out loud. “Cheeky bastard, asking his victim to save his life.”

  Wolf smiled broadly. “But of course she agreed.”

  Chance nodded. “Of course she did. He’s recovering nicely.”

  Wolf watched the reactions of all the people in the room to this pronouncement. Aar looked puzzled since she’d given a considerably more negative assessment earlier. Yefim looked relieved. Gleb looked like he’d been struck by lightning. Wolf himself looked at Chance with admiration. Perhaps she was a next-generation Sherlock Holmes after all.

  Clearly, Chance picked up on all these cues as well. She marched over to Gleb and ran her radiation detector up and down, sweeping him. She then did the same thing to Yefim. Wolf was not surprised when she said, “Wolf, Aar, please take Gleb into custody.”

  Gleb did not seem any more surprised than Wolf. “My family,” he muttered before falling silent.

  Chance explained the rest of the plan. “While you take Gleb to the brig, I’m going to check out the rest of the mansion here, see if I can find the polonium.” She raised an eyebrow at Gleb. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell us where it is?”

  Gleb sighed. “I flushed it down the toilet.”

  Chance pulled out her cell phone and called someone. “There’s polonium in our waste disposal system. Is there any chance it will get recycled into our food production chain?” She paused, listening. “Well, you’ll want to make sure, just in case.” She slipped the phone back in her pocket. “As I was saying I’m going to check out the rest of the mansion.” She turned once more to Gleb. “And I’ll see you in mediation,” she said cheerfully. Her expression turned grim. “Hopefully Dmitri will be able to join us.”

  As Joshua tapped his wooden block on the desk to start the proceedings, he felt an enhanced appreciation of the movie “Lion King.” The great Circle of Life had entered his mediation room. The leader of the attackers in his last violent crime case was now the victim.

  As usual, he started by considering the victim. “Dmitri. Believe it or not, I’m sorry to see you like this.” Dmitri sat in an oversized wheelchair, connected to what looked like half the plumbing of the BrainTrust, wheezing as he tried to breathe. Joshua turned to Dash, who stood next to Dmitri. “Is he going to be okay?”

  Dash spoke cautiously. “I am hopeful. There are indications that his condition has reached bottom and he will improve from here.”

  Chance, standing on the other side of Dmitri, was fiddling with the controls. “Dmitri insisted on coming here today, but it would be best if we took him back to medical sooner rather than later.”

  Joshua nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.” He turned to Gleb. “I have determined that you, like most of the assailants in these cases, have no hope of paying anything like reasonable compensation to your victim.” Really, Joshua was fascinated that in all these cases involving Dash and her friends, none of the defendants ever disputed the charges. He personally still had some doubts as to who should have been blamed when that Pakistani boy attacked Ping while she was dressed as a hooker, but as a mediator, it was as open and shut as the cases could get. “Ordinarily in a situation like this, I would simply send you back to Russia.”

  Dmitri caught Joshua’s eye, shaking his head vigorously. In disagreement. He turned and whispered to Chance. Chance turned to Joshua. “He says you can’t send them back to Russia. It would be a death sentence.”

  Joshua wondered if he would ever really get used to having the victims defend their attackers. At least he was getting better at keeping the astonishment from interfering with his studiously objective mediator’s face.

  Now Gleb shook his head as vigorously as Dmitri had shaken his. “You have to send me back to Russia. You must.”

  Okay, now that was a new wrinkle—the assailant refusing the victim’s help, even though his life was on the line. Joshua couldn’t help it; he lost control. The astonishment made him stare open-mouthed. “Are you telling me that you will not be executed upon arriving in Russia?”

  Gleb stared away into a bleak distance only he could see. “That’s not what I’m saying at all.” Silence hung in the room. Finally, Gleb spoke again. “Mediator, sir, could I speak with you for a moment in private?”

  Dmitri flailed in his chair. Chance leaned over to calm him and listened to him whisper once more, “Whatever Gleb has to say, Dmitri wants to hear it.” Dmitri nudged her. “He really sort of demands it, actually.”

  Joshua put his face in his hands, then looked back up at Gleb beseechingly. “Well?”

  Gleb frowned in exasperation. “As you wish, Mediator.”

  So Joshua retired to his private chambers with Gleb in tow. Dmitri followed, with Dash and Chance in attendance since they insisted that Dmitri not go anywhere without them, especially not to a place where the assassin would be, no matter that he was cuffed and chained and stripped of anything that could possibly cause harm. As a consequence, everybody from the main mediation room was now crammed into his office. Too late, he realized that he should have simply shut off the recording systems in the main room. Well, perhaps the cramped, stuffy quarters would inspire haste. Joshua addressed Gleb. “Well?”

  Gleb looked around at all the participants, and for a moment Joshua feared he would refuse to speak. But in the end he muttered, “I have to go back or the Premier will execute my wife and daughter.”

  Dmitri thrashed once again. More whispering, and Chance exclaimed, “You have a family? They’re still in Russia? Why didn’t I know this?”

  Gleb shrugged. “The Premier doctored the records. He didn’t want you to know. I didn’t dare tell you.”

  Joshua stood up and backed away until his back was against his bookshelves, his comforting books. “So if I send you back he’ll kill you, but if I don’t send you back he’ll kill your family.”

  Dash spoke, the dark anger once more clouding her eyes for a moment. “That man must be…stopped.”

  Chance spoke for Dmitri again. “You can’t send him back.”

  Gleb responded in terror, “you have to send me back.”

  Joshua waved his arms, driving everyone out. “Leave me. I must think about this.”

  Joshua sat down at his desk, placed his face once more in his hands, and tried to figure out a solution.

  In the end, he came up with a temporary fix. Amanda, the current chairman of the BrainTrust, was going to be furious with him. He could hardly wait to tell her. He returned to the main room and sat down. “I have made my decision.” He gave everyone a wry smile, and you could have heard a pin drop. “Gleb shall be placed in the brig, in preparation for deportation to Russia—“ as the entire victim’s side of the room began to object he held up a finger sternly, “— at a time of my selection, as yet to be determined.”

  Silence once again reigned as everyone in the room pondered the consequences.

  The first pers
on to react to this was Gleb. He collapsed into his chair with a sigh of relief. He realized, as Joshua had deduced, that the Premier would not execute his family while they could still be useful for leverage.

  Dmitri was next. Chance offered, “Dmitri will happily pay the costs of keeping him in the brig indefinitely, and as promised during the last mediation, will also pay compensation to the victims as you see fit.”

  Ah, yes, Joshua remembered, Dmitri was on the hook for any bad behavior by his bodyguards. Of course, since the only person who needed to receive compensation in this case was Dmitri himself, it seemed a bit ludicrous. And inefficient. But he supposed he was glad to know that Dmitri was willing to fulfill his earlier promise. “Actually, Dmitri, I have a task for you when you’re feeling better. Think of it as compensation for the victims.”

  Dmitri looked forlorn.

  Joshua laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s a task for which you are uniquely qualified. And you’ll even make a profit.”

  This caused Dmitri to raise an eyebrow, about as close as he could get to displaying eager anticipation in his current condition.

  Joshua was not surprised when Dash brought up the complications in his solution. “Mediator Joshua, is my understanding incorrect? I thought the brig space on the BrainTrust was very limited and we could not have long-term prisoners.”

  Joshua waved his hands. “What else can I do? Do you have a proposal?” For just a moment, a bit of hope rose in his heart. Of all of them, Dash was the most likely to actually come up with a better solution.

  Dash frowned. “I don’t have a thought offhand. What is Amanda going to say about this?”

  Joshua shuddered in half-mocking dread. “Since the very first day of BrainTrust operations, it has been an absolute policy to never have long-term prisoners aboard. I’d expect her to go through the roof.” He paused. “Before conceding that this is what we have to do.”