If Alice were to spend three minutes on the Homeland Security tips site now, Stewart Fleishman aka Russ Augenblick would face extradition, at the least.
“I need you to hack into the customs database,” she told him. “I want you to make me a passport with the information of an American, Canadian, or Brit actually traveling in Switzerland right now.” With such a passport she could waltz out of the country.
He grumbled. “Buy me a mescal shot too and I’ll try. A double.”
After their drinks, she followed him through the back exit and down a windy but otherwise quiet side street to his vintage VW love bus.
Demonstrating surprising courtliness, the forger trudged through slush to open the front passenger door for her. The entire van, apparently restored without regard to cost, smelled new.
With a hint of fresh male perspiration.
Alice knew without looking, but turned anyway. Four men in black jumpsuits and matching body armor sat in the back of the van, each gripping a Sig, the silenced barrels pointed at her.
By way of greeting, the man closest to her said, “Dienst fur Analyse und Pravention,” German for “Service for Analysis and Prevention,” the Swiss domestic intelligence agency, which, evidently, had a working relationship with a certain forger.
51
Despite the antiseptic scent unique to medical facilities, along with walls, cabinets, and a sparkling tile floor that matched the hospital white of a medic’s lab coat, the lack of windows suggested that the infirmary originally had been a locker room or showers.
Sergeant King said, between gasps, “He’s not breathing, Ginny.” The medic’s badge read GENEVIEVE in big block letters.
“I don’t think he’s got a pulse either,” said Corporal Flint, angling Drummond’s feet toward the examination table.
“Set him down and we will see if we can fix that,” Genevieve said.
Although barely into her twenties, she had the composure of a battle-hardened veteran. She whipped a fresh sheet from the roll of paper at the foot of the table, clamping it into place just as Drummond’s head hit the headrest. Lifting his chin upward with one hand and pressing back on his forehead with the other, she tilted back his face. She opened his mouth and checked for obstructions, finding none. No breathing either.
Pinching his nostrils shut, she fit her mouth over and around his, then commenced breathing for him, inhaling and exhaling slowly into his mouth. His chest rose and fell, again signifying no obstruction. She provided two more breaths, each about a second long, then pressed two fingers to the side of his throat.
“No carotid pulse, as far as I can tell,” she sighed, not so much a lament as a prognosis.
“What can we do?” asked King.
“Call for an ambulance. Say the casualty is having a cardiac arrest.”
King said, “Corporal?”
Nodding, Flint ran out.
Pointing to a white blanket, Genevieve said to King, “Sergeant, if you could roll that up and use it to elevate his feet by about fifteen inches …”
He did, offering better blood flow to Drummond’s heart, which Genevieve prepared to resuscitate by placing the heel of her right hand two or three inches above the tip of his sternum. She lay her left hand on top of her right and interlaced her fingers.
“It was probably his damned pills,” King said.
“What pills?” Genevieve locked her elbows and moved herself directly above Drummond, so that she could use the weight of her body, rather than her muscles, to perform the compressions, minimizing fatigue.
“Some kind of Alzheimer meds. Could that have anything to do with this?”
She nodded. “Do you have them?”
The sergeant whisked his hands over Drummond’s pockets without finding the bottle. “I’ll be right back.” He tore out of the infirmary.
Genevieve compressed Drummond’s chest wall by about three inches, or enough to break a rib, the desired amount. Compressions any weaker were ineffective. The point of squeezing the rib cage, after all, was to pump the heart.
She had repeated the process fifteen times, at a rate of approximately one hundred compressions per minute, when Drummond decided that it was time to end the cardiac arrest act he’d initiated by swallowing eight of his ten remaining pills. The experimental drug’s beta-blocker components-atenolol and metoprolol-had weakened his pulse to the point that it was undetectable, at least by harried marine guards and a medic in an under-equipped infirmary. He’d augmented the effect with a ploy as old as predators and prey, holding his breath.
He may have done the job too well, he thought, as he tried to get up from the examination table: A chill crept over his body, leaving him cold, clammy, and feeling weighted down, as if he were at the bottom of a deep sea. His extremities stung and the pressure neared skull-crushing. Everything around him blurred. The hiss of the overhead lamps, Genevieve’s breathing, and the rustling of her lab coat had the effect of trains blowing past. And both vomit and diarrhea burned within him.
Had he miscalculated the dosage?
Highly likely. His faculty for making calculations lately had been like an old television set that gets reception only at certain angles. Still, getting reception at all had been fortuitous. His son was locked in a detention room. And any moment might bring the return of the Cavalry agent who had tried to kill them-what was his name?
Steve?
Stanley?
Sandy?
Like the beach.
Saint Lucia’s beaches were as white as sugar.
Until he’d seen them for himself, he’d thought “sugar sand” was just the hyperbolical concoction of an advertising copywriter.
Drummond felt his thinking careening off the rails.
What matters, he told himself, is that Steve or Stanley or whoever will return, almost certainly with backup from the misguided Cavalry. And the marine guards here would prove no more potent than scarecrows in defense.
The world seemed to revert to its normal pace.
Drummond exhaled, with a cough, for effect.
Genevieve jumped, pleasantly surprised.
He tried to raise himself on his elbows and fell flat.
“Easy,” she said.
“I accidentally swallowed some …” he said just above a whisper before letting his voice trail off.
She leaned closer to hear. “Yes?”
He shot up his left arm, encircling her neck, clamping the crook of his elbow at her trachea.
She tried to cry out.
With his left hand he grasped his right bicep, placing his right hand behind her head, then brought his elbows together, applying as much pressure as he could generate to both sides of her neck, restricting the blood flow to her brain.
Unconscious, she sagged against him. He slid off the examination table, keeping a grip on her so that she wouldn’t fall. His knees buckled, but by force of will he remained standing.
He hoisted her onto the table. She would regain consciousness in seconds. The marines who had brought him here would return sooner.
There was simply no time for infirmity.
He took the white blanket from the foot of the examination table and cast it over her. The marines would mistake her for him, at least for a few seconds.
He crouched behind the crash cart, the portable trolley with the dimensions of a floor safe. It contained all equipment and medication required for cardiopulmonary emergencies, and he would need one of the meds momentarily. In the shorter term, the cart would hide him. He rotated it so that its drawers faced him.
Sergeant King entered at a jog. On seeing the fully covered body on the examination table, he froze. “Damn it,” he said to himself.
Hidden by the portion of the blanket hanging from the examination table, Drummond slowly opened the crash cart’s drawers fractions of an inch at a time, searching for succinylcholine, the swift-acting neuromuscular blocker used to facilitate endotracheal intubation. Drummond intended to use a small dose of the drug to temp
orarily paralyze King.
The sergeant wandered toward the table. “Ginny?” he asked at a whisper, as if worried about disturbing the corpse. “Where’d you go?”
Drummond found three pencil-sized preloaded succinylcholine syringes, each packing an eighteen-gauge needle.
Warily, King peeled the blanket from the head of the examination table. He recoiled, drawing his gun and shouting, “Flint!”
Drummond reached beneath the table and slung the needle sidearm into King’s calf. The sergeant looked down in mystification-he probably felt no more pain than if he’d been stung by an insect. Drummond sprang, hitting the floor on a roll, then reached and tapped the plunger, driving succinylcholine into King’s muscle.
King twisted away with such force that the needle jerked free and flew across the infirmary. It struck a cabinet on the far wall, lodging there like a dart.
Flint ran in, gun drawn. King pointed, superfluously, to Drummond, then crumpled to the floor, where he lay, unmoving.
Glad of the diversion, Drummond dove back behind the crash cart.
Flint pivoted on his heels, firing. Strips of linoleum slapped Drummond. The air clouded with sawdust that had been a chunk of the examination table.
From his knees, Drummond shoved the red cart at Flint.
The marine spun, shooting and ringing the face of it. The bullet exited through the uppermost drawer, whistling past Drummond’s ear, followed by a spray of glass and a milky white substance that smelled of alcohol.
Pushing the cart ahead of himself, Drummond picked up the gun King had dropped.
Another bullet pounded into the cart.
Drummond said, “I have a clean shot at you, son. Neither of us wants me to take it. So, slowly, set your sidearm down on the floor and kick it toward me.”
“Mr. Clark, sir, there is no chance whatsoever that you can get out of here, so-”
Drummond fired, aiming to Flint’s right. The wall a few inches from Flint’s right ear exploded into plaster dust. The man dropped to the floor.
Drummond tracked him through the gunsight. “We’re making progress. Now, all you have to do is surrender your weapon.”
Ashen, independent of the haze of plaster dust, the marine complied.
As Drummond reached for the weapon, something hard slammed into the back of his head. He fell against the crash cart, toppling it. As he hit the floor, he saw the metal bed rail swung like a cricket bat by Genevieve.
Meanwhile the crash cart’s five metal drawers dropped open and pounded him, the sharp corner of one ripping through his shirt and slicing into his chest. All manner of medical supplies rained onto him.
He implored himself to maintain focus; he had one last play in mind.
White light devoured his consciousness.
52
Snipers aim for the “apricot,” better known as the medulla oblongata, the part of the brainstem that controls the heart and lungs. To reach Charlie Clark’s, Gretchen Lanier needed to fire from the barely opened window of the third-floor hotel room, across and through more than three hundred yards of parkland, and into the barred detention rooms.
If only every job were so simple, she thought. A year ago in Afghanistan, she’d recorded a kill from 2,267 yards away, or 1.29 miles, on icy and mountainous terrain.
She dropped to a kneeling position at the foot of the bed. In her year and a half of sniper school, her instructors had placed almost as much emphasis on proficiency in camouflage and concealment as on marksmanship. More often than not it involved wearing a ghillie suit in order to pass for a bush or clump of weeds. Tonight’s camo involved surrounding the rifle with a well-placed pillow and the blankets bunched just so. Wrapping the comforter over the works simulated a person lying in the bed she and Stanley had rolled against the window.
She needed to accurately estimate and balance the many components in a bullet’s trajectory and point of impact. Range was simplest. From this relative proximity, she would have zero difficulty placing the red laser dot smack on the base of Charlie’s head. But if she made a mistake in calculating the effects of wind direction or velocity, among other factors, the round might fly several feet wide of Charlie and bore instead through the far wall of the detention room, possibly taking out the marine guard stationed on the other side.
Shooting at a downward angle also complicated matters. Gravity could wreak havoc on a shot traveling three thousand feet per second. Fortunately, the wind was almost nil, the conditions otherwise were practically ideal, and sniping technology had advanced at a head-spinning rate lately: The ballistic calculator in Lanier’s telescopic sight-and this was an el cheapo telescopic sight available in a Caribbean version of a hick gun shop-all but offered a glimpse at the future in the form of an animated preview of the shot.
She leaned into the stock’s cheek-piece and squinted against the cold scope to find not a view of an impromptu detention room, as she’d expected, but the profile of a young man with sandy blond hair. Charlie Clark, no doubt about it. The back of his head was centered almost exactly within the crosshairs.
She half expected him to turn around, feeling her eyes upon him.
He stood still, an ear pressed against the door, as if trying to hear through it.
She disengaged her conscience. The target became a piece of paper with concentric circles around a bull’s-eye rather than a human being with loved ones who would suffer from his loss.
Rather than draw attention with the laser range finder, she used the mil dot reticle in the scope-a sort of electronic slide rule-to find the range. 194.8 meters, or, as she thought of it, nothing.
Anticipating the target’s behavior was integral to a precise shot. With moving targets, the point of aim was ahead of the target, the distance depending on his speed and angular movement. A stationary target like this was the sniper’s version of a three-inch putt.
Lanier zeroed the scope, then looked over her shoulder at Stanley, who sat in an executive-style simulated-leather desk chair with a gash in the back.
“How’re things in the Sound Department?” she asked. He tapped nine digits on his BlackBerry. “Just waiting on your cue now.”
When she pulled the trigger, he would dial a tenth number, sending a radio signal to detonate a C-4 shaped charge not much larger than a Tic Tac. She’d stuck it to a transformer hanging within easy reach of the roof. The blast would obscure the thunderous report of the M40. The simpler solution, a suppressor, would skew her shot. When possible, she opted for loud sounds heard in the environment, exploding artillery shells in an Afghanistani combat zone, for example, or, in places like Martinique, fourth-rate transformers that blew as often as the wind.
She pressed her eye against the scope, locating Charlie where she’d last seen him.
The bullet would require.93 seconds to reach the point of impact. She would squeeze the trigger straight back with the ball of her finger to avoid jerking the gun sideways. She took a deep breath, then let the air out in small increments, the idea being to hold her lungs empty at the moment she took the shot. To further minimize barrel motion, she would fire between the beats of her heart.
As always, a calm enveloped her, removing Stanley and the room and the rest of Martinique from her consciousness-everything but herself, her weapon, and her target.
53
Drummond regained consciousness, but his vision remained cloudy. Flint knelt beside him, along with King, who seemed to have fully recovered from the succinylcholine.
“They said he was good, but who could’ve anticipated this?” King was saying.
The words came at Drummond as if through a bullhorn. He yielded to the need to vomit, letting it spill out of his lips and, purposefully, down his shirtfront.
The rest of the infirmary came back into focus as the marines each grabbed him by an armpit, hoisting him to his feet. Flint patted Drummond’s shorts in search of a weapon. Genevieve stood by, still gripping the bed rail, at the ready.
“Cheee-rist,” Flint said,
turning his nose away from the vomit.
Drummond staggered. With intent.
Flint lost his grip on him.
Drummond shot his right hand into his shirt pocket, drawing out one of the succinylcholine syringes he’d gathered from the floor. In the same motion, he swung it into Flint’s shoulder, then popped the plunger.
Flint whirled around, swinging.
Drummond ducked the fist.
As Flint reared back for another try, he dropped unconscious into Drummond’s arms, providing a shield against King, whose gun was aimed at Drummond.
“That’s enough, Mr. Clark,” he said. “Set him down.”
Drummond flung the sedated corporal toward King, who instinctively reached to catch the younger man. At the same time, Drummond dove at King, jabbing a second syringe into the sergeant’s bicep.
King threw a heavyweight blow to Drummond’s jaw.
Again, the room began to fade to white.
Drummond flailed, catching the edge of the examination table to keep from falling.
King plucked the needle free of his arm. He retrained his gun barrel. “Hands in the sky.”
With effort, Drummond raised his arms.
“Now back against the wall and-” King teetered.
Drummond snatched the Glock away from him and whirled toward Genevieve.
Mouth open, she let the bed rail fall, ringing on the floor tile.
“I don’t want to hurt you, believe it or not,” Drummond said.
“Why should I believe you?” She had to shout over the wail of the arriving ambulance.
“I might be able to convince you if I had a minute.” He clapped the handcuff that had been intended for him onto her right wrist. “But I don’t.”
Charlie’s thoughts were whirling like a roulette wheel, the ball popping from anguish to denial, when the detention room door swung inward. Stepping clear of it, he heard an odd pop behind him. Something buzzed past his head. A bullet hole appeared in the doorframe, venting smoke.
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