Upon A Pale Horse (Bio-Thriller)

by Russell Blake

  A shuffling from a doorway behind him startled him; just as he registered a fast-moving form approaching from the shadows of a nearby building, a starburst of pain shot through his head and he crumpled to the sidewalk, his vision already dimming before he hit the concrete, unconscious.

  TWENTY-NINE

  A Mugging

  Jeffrey’s first tentative sensation of awareness came in the form of a corpulent man’s face only a few feet from his, the steam of his breath carrying with it a vague scent of cabbage and onions. He cracked his eyes open more and the man leaned away from him, yelling something in German. When Jeffrey struggled to push himself to a sitting position, the man returned his attention to him, barking a harsh command.

  “Nein!”

  Jeffrey reached to the back of his head, from which intense pain was radiating, and his fingers came away wet, sticky with blood.

  “Nein,” the man snapped again, and then everything receded and Jeffrey closed his eyes, reasoning that it wouldn’t hurt to get a little rest while all the commotion was going on around him.

  The next thing he knew he was being hoisted onto a gurney, a stiff brace around his neck, and he winced as movement caused agony to flare through his skull, which felt as he imagined it would if he stuck it into a car crusher. A burst of static sounded from a nearby radio, and then he was inside an ambulance and bouncing down the road, explosions of suffering greeting every bump and speed change.

  It seemed like only a few minutes later that he was being wheeled into a hospital, the smell distinctively medicinal, antiseptic wafting through the air like astringent fog. A physician, Jeffrey guessed from his white exam coat and the stethoscope draped around his neck, young and earnest, appeared in his field of view, and quickly shined a small flashlight into each eye, issuing terse instructions to someone Jeffrey couldn’t see.

  More movement, and then delicate hands were probing at the back of his head before pulling away.

  An hour and a half later he was stitched and had been through his first-ever cranial CT scan, and was waiting for the attending physician to appear and give him the results. The pain had gradually subsided after a nurse gave him an injection, and he was now in a somnambulistic purgatory somewhere between full consciousness and oblivion, barely registering when a figure entered and approached him.

  “Can you understand me?” The words seemed to arrive as though from a great distance, and Jeffrey knew that he needed to focus and wake up – this was something important. His eyes flickered and opened, and he saw the same young doctor looking at him with concern.

  And speaking English, with a slight German inflection, the particular harshness of that tongue coloring his words.

  “Mr. Rutherford. Can you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Jeffrey croaked, his voice sounding like an old gate creaking open.

  “You’re in the hospital. You were attacked. Mugged, yes, that is the word? Robbed. You sustained a severe blow to the head, and have a concussion. No intracranial bleeding, but serious, still. I’m admitting you, and you will need to stay for a day or two, yes?” the doctor said, the question more stylistic than interrogative.

  “Mugged…”

  “Yes. You’re very lucky someone found you quickly. You lost a lot of blood. The blow to the head was an ugly one. Only four stitches, but a bleeder.”

  Jeffrey felt suddenly nauseated, the lights overly bright, his vision fuzzy. “How…how long?”

  “How long will you be here, or were you passed out?”

  “…Here…”

  “That depends on your recovery. All concussions are different. Basically, your brain hit the inside walls of your skull, so it’s injured. The question is one of degree. You may be feeling better in a few more hours, or it could take days. We will keep you under observation until you’re improved. For now, all you have to do is rest and let your body heal itself.”

  “What…you said robbed?”

  “Yes. The police gathered your things and will be by later to speak with you, but not before I give my approval.”

  “My…things…”

  “I’m afraid your money was stolen, but they left your wallet and passport. And a key card from your hotel. That’s all the police told me.”

  Jeffrey shut his eyes again, too much information hitting him, overwhelming him. “My hotel…”

  “The police will notify them so that your room isn’t disturbed. Don’t worry. In the meantime, I’m going to leave you to rest. Once you’re feeling better, I can have one of the nurses make a call for you, if there’s someone you’d like to notify about your accident.”

  “Um…no. I’m alone here…”

  “Very well, then. They’ll be wheeling you to a room in a little while, and then you’re to stay put and sleep. Don’t try to get up. Right now, you need to remain immobile. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  The hospital noises drifted away as he closed his eyes, and soon he was back in a stilted dreamland, his last memory before he slipped into complete unconsciousness an image of a diagram and rows of numbers that made no sense to him, as alien as an artifact of an ancient, forgotten civilization.

  “I’m telling you, he was clean. There was nothing on him.” The caller spoke in soft tones, his voice never rising above the level of a murmur.

  “Then what was he doing at a private bank? At that hour? Are you absolutely sure?”

  “We searched every inch of him. There was nothing – no notes, no flash drive, nothing. Look – he’s an attorney. He specializes in asset protection, right? Is it possible that his visit to the bank pertained to business?”

  “Anything’s possible, but we aren’t paid for speculation. We need to be sure he doesn’t know anything that could compromise our effort. We’re far too close to implementation.”

  “Then let me terminate him. Problem solved.”

  “Not necessarily. If he talked to someone…no, we can’t just finish him. We need to continue surveillance and see what he does next. I don’t need to remind you how devastating it would be if we were discovered.”

  “So we maintain our watch,” the speaker said resignedly.

  “Correct. He likely doesn’t know anything, but this makes me nervous.”

  “Do you have anyone working on getting inside the bank?”

  “We’re pulling out all the stops. With any luck, we’ll know what he was doing there by tomorrow. But that’s not a guarantee – if we can’t find a point of weakness with the staff, we may never know.”

  “Well, the good news is that he didn’t have anything on him.”

  “Yes, he may be ignorant of the plan. But we need to be sure.”

  “It shouldn’t be much longer, should it?”

  “We’re only days away.”

  “At which point it won’t matter. The world will have bigger problems than what one attorney may or may not know.”

  “But until that point, he’s your top priority. That hasn’t changed.”

  “I understand. He’s not going anywhere. The hospital is going to hold him for at least twenty-four hours, and probably longer. So for the near term, he’s neutralized.”

  “Report back to me if anything changes.”

  “As always,” the speaker said, and then disconnected. An announcement boomed from the overhead public address system, calling for a crash cart in the emergency room. The man surveyed his surroundings, eyeing the waiting patients, and then moved back into the hospital corridor, his green surgical scrubs making him as anonymous as any of the other staff hurrying to attend to their duties, everyone focused on their preoccupations and uninterested in the young orderly.

  At the end of the wing he spied an exit sign over a doorway, and in a minute he was outside, disappearing around a corner, his work at the hospital, at least for the moment, concluded.

  THIRTY

  Truth Hurts

  Jeffrey awoke at one a.m., the squishing sound of a nurse’s rubber soles against the hallway vinyl floor
tiles as distinctive a sound as a cat yowling in heat. He opened his eyes and gazed around his private room. The chair and rolling table at the far end were illuminated by faint, ghostly moonlight from the window, the bluish-white luminescence leaking through the blinds and coloring everything with a spectral glow.

  He groped at the side of the bed and found the control, then raised the back until he was sitting up. His head hurt, but not nearly as profoundly as earlier, which he took as a welcome sign that he was mending. He understood the concept of a concussion, having had a minor one as a child in a fall from a tree – his brain had been bruised, the fluid that surrounded it inadequate to the job of protecting it after a certain amount of force.

  Jeffrey squinted in the dark and was relieved to note that his vision wasn’t blurry anymore, which was further indication that the trauma was receding. He couldn’t be sure, but given his progress, he might be released tomorrow. That heartened him, although he had no intention of trying to catch the last of the conference – while he wanted more than anything to believe that the mugging had been random, his instinct knew better. He had been knocked unconscious literally seconds after leaving the bank. Difficult to believe that was coincidence. Fortunately, he’d heeded his brother’s instructions and left everything in the box, so any search would have come up empty. Which was probably the only reason he was still alive. They had no idea what he knew, if anything.

  The irony was that he had no idea what he knew, either. The endless columns of numbers meant nothing to him. If someone had threatened him at gunpoint to spill the beans, at best he would have been able to say that he’d seen a nonsensical spreadsheet and an unintelligible diagram.

  A lance of pain stabbed through his neck, and he reached up and felt where they’d stitched his head, a tiny shaved area around the wound where stubble prickled his fingertips as he gingerly probed the lump. How the hell was he supposed to save the planet if he didn’t know what specifically was going to happen, or who was going to do whatever it was, or how? And how was he supposed to prevail against an adversary that could pick him off on the streets of Zurich at will, and who knew his every move?

  Which stopped his racing thoughts dead. How were they tracking him? The obvious method was the cell phone – but he hadn’t taken it with him to the bank. Which implied that they’d put him under physical surveillance, further complicating his predicament. So now he’d have to become an expert at ducking a professional surveillance team. Good luck with that, he thought morosely.

  They’d left his credit cards and identification, which implied they could track the cards whenever he used them. As to his passport, most opportunistic muggers wouldn’t have taken it, preferring to do a quick cash grab and then run before they were seen, so his assailants had stuck to that script. That was somewhat of a relief, although he could have easily gotten a replacement passport in a few days through the embassy, so not a meaningful break.

  His head swam with the implications of trying to go off the radar so he could track down the contacts his brother had directed him to. Dumping the cell would be easy, but losing a pro team would not, and he hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about it.

  But he would need to figure it out. And quickly. He couldn’t stay in Europe for very long without triggering alarms, and unfortunately all three of his objectives were there.

  So now he had to evade detection, interrogate a hostile Nazi, and get to the scientific researchers in France or Italy – all while seeming to be going about his innocent business.

  And stay alive.

  That last bit would be perhaps the most difficult if he failed in any of his objectives. He had no doubt that he would be earmarked for execution the moment he slipped up – there would come a point where he posed more of a danger to his stalkers than knowing whom he’d talked to would compensate for, and judging by his brother’s death, nothing would stop them once they’d decided he needed killing.

  He looked at his watch, and an ugly idea occurred to him as he checked the time – the muggers had also neglected to take his Rolex, which struck him as odd, and the suspicion that it could also have a tracking device in it flitted through him. He’d have to do something about it. For now, he assumed they knew where he was, so there was no point.

  It was one in the morning, which translated to seven in the evening in Washington. Was it possible Jakes might still be at his office? The man certainly kept odd hours, and Jeffrey debated quietly with himself before deciding to try standing. If that went well, he would attempt to find a telephone – using the room phone was a sucker bet. He carefully unclasped his watch and placed it under his pillow, then swung his legs over the side of the bed. At least he didn’t have to contend with unhooking any machines – he’d obviously been stable enough to be relegated to the non-critical ward, which made him feel a little better about his condition.

  His feet touched the cool floor and a wave of dizziness passed through him, but after a few seconds everything normalized and he felt stable, if weak. He was wearing an open-back gown, and he tried walking to the small closet and was heartened when he made it without blacking out. His shirt and pants were hanging inside, having been cleaned by a conscientious staff – typical Swiss efficiency.

  Two minutes later he was dressed, and he crept to the partially open door, ears straining for any hint of movement in the corridor on the opposite side. Nothing greeted him, and after several moments he eased the door wider and stepped out into an empty, brightly lit hall. Jeffrey checked in both directions and then opted for the right, and found himself in a large main area at the end of the passage, a nurse’s station on the far side with a solitary nurse talking on the phone, her back to him. He inched past and then came to a bank of elevators, their oversized doors facing him like silent sentries.

  When he arrived at the ground floor there was more activity, and an attendant at the information desk looked up from reading her paperback novel and in response to his one-word question pointed to a bank of pay phones near the bathrooms. He thanked her with a muttered “Danke” and shuffled over to them, feeling suddenly worse for wear, the exertion not a great idea so soon after the head injury.

  After a few tries he connected to an operator, who put him through to an international operator for the collect call. Jeffrey recited Jakes’ number and his last name, then waited as the phone rang, its tone hollow in his ear. When Jakes answered, his unmistakable voice distinctive even thousands of miles away, the operator announced Jeffrey’s name and he grudgingly accepted the call.

  “Collect from Switzerland? You do lead an interesting life,” Jakes growled when the operator had dropped off the line.

  “I got mugged. They got my cash, and I haven’t had a chance to get back to the hotel and reload. I’m in the hospital. Concussion.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be okay if I don’t stroke out first. Did you get a chance to follow up on Monica?”

  A long pause echoed across the chasm, seconds building with tension before the PI cleared his throat.

  “Maybe this should wait until you’re feeling better,” Jakes started, and Jeffrey’s heart dropped, dreading what was coming.

  “No. I need to know what you learned.”

  “You sure? Let’s just say it’s not good.”

  “I got that from your bedside manner. Just tell me. I can take it.”

  “You’re the boss. The arrest? She was busted for prostitution when she was seventeen. No further collars since then, but generally speaking, you have to have been hooking for a while before you get caught. It’s a little like drunk driving – it’s never the first time that gets you arrested, you know?”

  “Prostitution. You’re absolutely sure?” Pained defeat colored Jeffrey’s words.

  “No doubt. Which brings me to what she’s been doing since we picked her up yesterday. I’ll spare you all the details. The short version is she had a date. A professional one, judging by the age of her companion. So either she was having d
inner with Dad, who she’s very, very fond of, or she was making some money while you were out of the picture.”

  “What do you mean, a date? She went to a restaurant? That’s it?”

  “No. She went to a restaurant and then to a hotel, where she stayed for two and a half hours before departing just after midnight.”

  Jeffrey was suddenly reeling, his worst fears coming out of the handset he clutched to his ear. He gripped the small steel counter beneath the phone for support and leaned against the edge of the glass panel separating it from its twin.

  “Are you still there?” Jakes asked hesitantly.

  “God. I’m such an idiot…”

  “No, you aren’t. You smelled a rat, and you hired me. So your instincts were good. Look, you aren’t the first guy with a few bucks who’s gotten involved with a pro who wanted to get out of the biz, and maybe wasn’t completely forthcoming about her résumé. Don’t beat yourself up. You’re not omniscient, and there’s no way you could have known, given that she misrepresented everything about herself.”

  Jeffrey felt like he was choking, and didn’t trust himself to speak. He badly wished he could confide in the investigator, but that wasn’t an option. Best case he could ask him some questions and get ideas.

  The line hummed. In the lobby behind him, a woman coughed. Jeffrey began to regain his composure as he digested the news about Monica – news that he’d feared, but also was better off knowing.

  “Jakes, it might not be that simple. Listen, I want to ask you a few professional questions. Hypothetical things I’ve been playing with…for a book I’m penciling out. Could you help me with them, and not read too much into it?”

  “You want to ask me hypothetical questions at ten bucks a minute from Europe, where it’s gotta be two in the morning?” Jakes asked tonelessly.