The Fifth Vial

by Michael Palmer

“There should be plenty of that very soon.”

  “Tell me, Xavier, have you heard anything from Vargas? He was due here late today.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Must be another woman. Single, married, young, old, virgin, whore, willing, reluctant. They dot his landscape like cow plop. I tell you, Santoro, someday, one of those women is going to be the death of him.”

  Thirty-One

  They see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book VII

  Moving as little as she could, Natalie waited for two more agonizing minutes before she stretched out and, with no little difficulty, crawled to the pantry. Half expecting to be surprised by someone, she made her way back through the tunnel, past the pool, and into the forest, wondering if Luis would still be waiting for her on the hilltop north of the hospital. As best she could recall, she retraced her steps around the building, and then started up a rather steep incline. After a short while, perhaps halfway up the hill, she gave in to the altitude, her hip, the slope, and the tension of the past hour, and sank to the ground, hungry for air.

  Luis had probably gone back to the village anyway, she reasoned, suddenly feeling immeasurably sorry for herself. The whole business of the hospital at Dom Angelo had been nothing but a scam—an organ-theft operation with a high-tech component thrown in. It had been her misfortune to have flagged down the wrong cab at the Jobim Airport. As usual, pure and simple evil was purely and simply about money. An O-positive lung? Well, you’re in luck. We’re running a special on those this week. Next week, livers. The quartet of military policemen, now a trio, were into gemstones and organs—emeralds and kidneys, opals and lungs. Pay for one, pay for the other. Disgusting.

  Natalie pushed herself to her feet and trudged upward, not really caring if she met up with Luis or found Dom Angelo or not. At the top of the ridge, with no sign of Fernandes, she turned and gazed back downhill at the hospital, glowing beneath the spotlights and what was now the first blush of dawn.

  How many lungs? she wondered. How many hearts? How many deaths?

  This wasn’t trading in organs, this was simply stealing them—stealing them and implanting scenarios in the poor victims’ minds. When Luis was describing burying the bags containing the bodies of donors, she had wondered why that wasn’t her fate as well. Now, she knew. She was being kept alive as a test subject for the product and technique being developed by Donald Cho and Cedric Zhang—a new cottage industry for the enterprising military policemen to support, and ultimately, more money for their coffers. In all likelihood, someone had been checking up on her in Boston, maybe by rifling the records of her therapist.

  It all hung together perfectly.

  “Did you run into trouble?”

  Startled, Natalie whirled. Despite the dense undergrowth, Luis had come up behind her soundlessly.

  “God, do not sneak up on me like that—especially when I have a gun.”

  Luis’s wry expression made words unnecessary. There was no way she would have ever gotten a shot off.

  “Come,” he said, “there is a better place for us to sit and talk.”

  In silence, they walked north and west, rising up into some of the densest forest Natalie had yet encountered. This time, Luis seemed more mindful of her physical limitations, and actually helped her through some of the more difficult parts. At the top of a particularly steep rise, the forest suddenly opened up, revealing a solid granite plateau, fifteen feet across and eight feet deep, tucked against a hillside. To the south and east was a clear view of the hospital and the land beyond it. The spectacular vista, with the early morning sun washing across it, belied the evil that resided there.

  “I nearly got caught,” she said after her breathing had returned to normal.

  “I thought that you had, and actually said a prayer for you. Do you need to lie down?”

  “No, no, I’m okay.”

  Natalie quickly recounted her close call in the hospital.

  “So, you were brainwashed into thinking you had been shot,” Luis said when she was done.

  “The techniques they are developing could be a source of great profit when they are fully perfected. I don’t know the exact details of how it works, but I suspect that first they used hypnotic drugs to open my mind to suggestion. Then, using a visor that’s like a TV directly over my eyes, and a scene recorded as I would have viewed it, they implanted a reality in my brain. They even used electrodes to add the sharp pain in my back as the bullets hit me.”

  “That is impressive.”

  “It is terrible. I wonder how many poor souls have lost organs there.”

  “They perform maybe one procedure every two weeks.”

  “How frightening.”

  “So, Vargas is dead, and you have the answers you were seeking. I guess we are finished, you and I.”

  For a time, Natalie sat, arms folded around her knees, gazing out at the lush panoply below, sorting through her feelings. Luis was right. She had battled her depression and her demons and come to Rio again because of unanswered questions. Now, there was nothing left but to return to Boston, continue with her pulmonary rehab, and await her position on the lung allocation scoreboard.

  She had been at the wrong place at the wrong time, and as a result, life as she knew it had been destroyed. Still, the fire to end her life had, at least for the moment, been quenched by a sense of pride over what she had accomplished over the few days since her return to Brazil.

  “Luis, what do you think would happen if I contacted the American embassy or the Brazilian police about what is going on here?” she asked.

  “The truth?”

  “The truth.”

  “There is an enormous amount of money supporting this hospital. You can destroy the building, but unless the people behind it are dead, it will simply be built up again. Besides, I don’t know how you do things in America, but here we need proof that a crime has been committed before people can be convicted. Right now the only proof we have is that Jeep you rented and the dead body of a policeman in the stream below it. Oh, yes, I also believe you have the policeman’s car.”

  Natalie nodded that she understood. For a time, as dawn brightened into morning, the only sound was the forest. When Natalie did speak, the words were from the woman who had stood up to Cliff Renfro and Tonya Levitskaya.

  “Luis,” she heard herself say, “these people have killed many and also have ruined the lives of many more—including mine. I am not satisfied with just answers, I want satisfaction. I want vengeance. If I die trying, then I die. The one good thing, if you can call it that, of all I have been through, is that there is little left for me to fear. I want to do whatever I must to close this place down for good—to turn it into dust. And I want Santoro and Barbosa behind bars or I want them dead.”

  “You know,” Luis said, “more and more as I think about what was done to my sister, I have been feeling the same way. If it had not been Vargas who had murdered her, it would have been Barbosa or one of the others.”

  “I agree.”

  “You must be certain, though, that you are willing to risk everything for your revenge. What advantage we have will rest in that certainty.”

  “I am certain, Luis. The best I have to look forward to is not a life I wish to lead.”

  “Then we shall try.”

  Luis offered his hand and Natalie held it tightly.

  “So, what can we do?” she asked.

  “Maybe nothing,” Luis said, slipping his fingers beneath his eye patch and rubbing at whatever was under there, “maybe everything. First we need some weapons, and then we need some help.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “We start right here.”

  Luis walked to the hillside behind them and pulled some shrubs from the ground. Behind those, five feet from top to bottom and also across, was the opening to a cave.

  “I never noticed that!” Natal
ie exclaimed.

  “That is the point. Very few know this is here. Inside we have guns, explosives, and a place to hide should we need it.”

  “But why do you—?”

  “In my line of work, it always pays to be careful and to plan ahead.”

  “Can I look inside?”

  “You can, but first I suggest you look over there.”

  Natalie turned toward where Luis had pointed, toward the southeast, but she saw and heard nothing new.

  “Here,” Luis said, handing her a pair of high-powered binoculars he had retrieved from just inside the opening of the cave. “Look beyond the hospital, then listen.”

  Natalie saw immediately. A long runway, very long, lined with alternating blue and white lights, had been carved east to west into the forest some distance beyond the hospital. Nearly a minute later, she heard what Luis had heard some time ago, the drone of an approaching plane. Moments after that, she saw an airliner soaring in low from the east.

  Luis and Natalie lay side by side on the rock shelf, trading off the remarkable binoculars, watching as the plane made a perfect landing, then turned at a cul-de-sac that had undoubtedly been created just for that purpose, and taxied to a spot midway down the runway. From somewhere in the trees, both Barbosa and Santoro, accompanied by four people carrying semiautomatic weapons, materialized to greet the arrivals.

  A hydraulic lift lowered from the belly of the jetliner, bearing an unconscious woman on a stretcher, along with an accompanying man and woman in surgical garb. Next trip, the platform bore three men, one of them a huge blond with a ponytail, and a woman. They were followed by a uniformed crew of two. As the procession neared the hospital, the lift made one more trip, bringing down a man dressed as the captain, wearing his uniform hat, and one other man, in shirt-sleeves—perhaps, Natalie decided, the flight attendant.

  Finally, Barbosa and two of his men entered the jetliner and began unloading luggage and other supplies.

  “I make it eight men and two women,” Luis said. “Plus Santoro, Barbosa, and four security guards from the village.”

  “It would seem that our odds of success have just dropped significantly.”

  “To some extent.”

  “Please explain.”

  “One of those men with Barbosa would give his life for me, and one of the other guards, the one with the red hat, is my Rosa.”

  Thirty-Two

  The best of all…is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all…is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation.

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book II

  Ben was pleased with himself—very pleased. He had rolled the dice and had them come up sevens. Nearly twenty hours among the enemy, posing as a man he was not, performing a job of which he had no knowledge, and he had succeeded. In fact, he acknowledged, he was actually quite good at serving people cheerfully and obsequiously, and equally skilled at staying out of the way when he wasn’t doing that.

  The flight was long, but reasonably easy, with a stop in Venezuela to take on fuel, and another one someplace in Brazil, possibly to do business with an immigration official. Never did he see an actual customs agent. It was amazing how smooth the water could be when it was blanketed with an oil slick of money. Ultimately, he watched through the small porthole in the forward door as the jet swept low over dense forest that went on for many miles, banked slightly to the right, and then dropped down on a well-lit runway that seemed to have materialized from the undergrowth.

  The landing was textbook.

  By far, the most distressing part of the flight had been the several visits he made to the compartment at the rear of the plane, where the woman who had been the prisoner in the Adventurer lay in what had to be a drug-induced coma. The night before, she had cried out that her name was Sandy, and that she was a mother. Now, she looked only like someone who was about to die. In a bizarre, horrible sacrifice, she would unwillingly lose a vital organ so that another—probably a total stranger—might live.

  A man and a woman in surgical scrubs with stethoscopes in place were tending to her. The man, swarthy and thick-necked, sounded and looked more like a longshoreman than a doctor, but the woman, silver-haired and probably in her sixties, had a cultured manner and speech suggesting she might well be a physician. They called for soft drinks, then on two occasions for meals. The woman on the stretcher had an oxygen mask and IV in place, as well as a cardiac monitor. She was a rather pretty redhead in her forties, and looked serene and at peace, but Ben was nearly overwhelmed by the memory of her pathetic cries.

  The chances were slim at best, he knew, but somehow he had to find a way to help her escape.

  The man named Vincent was taller and broader across the shoulders than Ben remembered. From the moment the killer stepped onto the plane, Ben was searching for any sign of having been recognized, and replaying, as best he could, every second of their encounter in Cincinnati. It was so dark in the garage, and everything had happened so quickly. It didn’t seem likely the man had gotten a solid look at him. By the time they had been airborne for a few hours, Ben’s concerns had largely vanished.

  For his part, Vincent spent much of the flight asleep on the shoulder of his girlfriend. Connie was most definitely not the girl of Ben’s dreams. She was a ferret-faced woman with a barbed-wire tattoo around her upper arm and a tight white tee that accentuated her huge breasts. She smoked throughout the flight, while the other two security guards played cards or slept.

  “How’re you doing, Seth? Almost finished cleaning up?”

  The captain, a burly man named Stanley Holian, was as laid-back and nonthreatening as Vincent and the team of security people were menacing. Ben had been in the cockpit as much as he had been anywhere on the plane, and was grateful for every minute of SportsCenter he had ever watched. A few batting averages and an opinion as to who was going to win the National League pennant, and he was just one of the guys.

  “One more minute, Stan.”

  While Holian finished up in the cockpit, Ben made a final pass through the now-deserted main cabin, and then entered the area at the rear of the plane, shielded from the main cabin by a curtain. He was looking for something, anything that might serve as a weapon. He found nothing that he could count on, which was probably for the good. This was not Seth Stepanski he was dealing with. It was a trio of professional killers. That he had succeeded against Vincent in Cincinnati only lengthened the odds of his succeeding again. Unless he found help in the rain forest, it was wishful, fanciful thinking to believe he could free the comatose sacrificial lamb and make it safely back to civilization.

  So, what next?

  He still had the elements of acceptance and surprise working for him, but that was about all. Minute by minute he would just have to assess the situation and search for a scenario—any scenario—that had even a remote chance of success. Was he willing to stand by and leave Sandy to her fate? He might have to, he acknowledged. Dying himself wasn’t the answer to putting these people out of business. He felt ill at the prospect of readying the plane for the flight back to the States, knowing what had happened to the woman—knowing that because of these people, there was an eight-year-old boy who was never going to see his mother again.

  Stan Holian was waiting for him by the elevator to the hold. Was there a gun someplace in the cockpit? Ben wondered. He glanced down the aisle. The door to that room was closed and almost certainly locked.

  “Where in the heck are we, Stan?”

  “Brazil.”

  “Very funny.”

  “North and west of Rio. Seventy-five, maybe a hundred miles.”

  “I’ve never been to Brazil.”

  “Nice place. Truly beautiful women. I don’t expect you’ll get to do much sightseeing on this trip, though. Day after tomorrow, maybe the day after that, we’ll be heading back.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  Holian pointedly ignored the question and motioned Ben past the roughly dressed
Brazilians who were transferring boxes of supplies to the hydraulic platform. As they were lowered from the belly of the plane, Ben caught a glimpse of a sprawling white building nestled in the forest. Then it disappeared behind the trees. Once on the ground, all he could see around them was the forest. The early morning was cool, and after so many hours in the plane, the moisture-rich air, laden with the sounds of insects, tasted especially sweet.

  Vincent was waiting for them by a broad dirt path off the edge of the runway. Then the three of them—pilot, flight attendant, and killer—made their way in silence until the path emptied into a road, this one much wider and more gravelly, with well-established tire impressions.

  “You go on ahead, Captain,” Vincent said to the pilot. “Same room as always. Your bag’ll be there soon. I have something I want to go over with Seth, here.”

  Holian did as he was asked. As the man disappeared around a bend, Ben, alone with Vincent for the first time, began feeling a nugget of apprehension.

  “The hospital’s just around there,” Vincent said. “It’s an amazing operation. You’ll be impressed.”

  “I’ll bet I will,” Ben said, searching for any giveaway in the killer’s tone.

  “Do you know what’s going to happen to that woman we brought here?”

  The nugget expanded.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, pal, we’re going to cut her heart out. How about you, Seth? Do you know what we’re going to do with you?”

  “I don’t—”

  Before Ben could say another word, a long-barreled pistol materialized in Vincent’s hand and whipped across the side of Ben’s face, sending him spinning to the ground.

  “Did you really think you could get away with this, you stupid shit?” Vincent said. “I had to go to the operating room to have that damn paint cleared from my eyes. Did you think I wasn’t going to remember you? You didn’t fool Janet in the office for a second. She had a photo of you brought to me before you had even opened your suitcase.” He kicked Ben viciously in the back. “How long before you’re a candidate for the operating room?” Another kick. “I think we should find that out.”