Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

by George C. Chesbro

  "Mongo?"

  I took my knuckles out of my eyes, saw Francisco standing in the doorway looking very anxious. "What is it, Francisco?"

  "I . . . saw you through the glass. Are you all right?"

  "Yeah," I answered, rising from my chair. "Call SwissAir and book me on the first available flight to Switzerland. Also, get me a hotel reservation somewhere in or near Berne, and then call me a cab."

  "Yes, sir."

  I went up to my apartment, hurriedly pocketed my passport, and packed a bag, evading Michael's tentative, anxious questions about where I was going. I did not want to get his hopes up. This trip to Switzerland was sure to cost me a minimum of two days, assuming I was successful and didn't run afoul of any Swiss police, and by the time I got back, Margaret's supply of capsules would be almost gone. I dearly wished I had made a copy of the Punch and Judy tape to take along with me, but I hadn't. I doubted MacWhorter would authorize releasing a copy when he found out why I wanted it, and there was nothing to be done about it now. On the other hand, key Lorminix executives already knew what I knew, and undoubtedly knew that I knew it; the problem wasn't in getting their attention, but getting them to cooperate.

  Francisco was on the phone as I passed the glass wall of the office on my way out. I tapped on the glass to wave goodbye. He saw me and started, then urgently motioned for me to come in. I opened the door and leaned in as he covered the receiver with his palm. "Have I got a flight?"

  "Yes. Your plane leaves in fifty-five minutes, and SwissAir will arrange for your hotel reservation. You have—"

  "Jesus," I said, glancing at my watch. If I was blessed, I just might make it to JFK in time.

  Francisco, a worried expression on his face, held out the telephone. "You have a call, Mongo."

  "Is it from or concerning Bailey Kramer?"

  "No, but—"

  "Then tell them I'll get back to them. I'll call you here or at home when I get in."

  Without waiting for his reply, I went out the door, bounded down the steps and across the sidewalk to the cab waiting at the curb. I hurled my bag into the back seat, got in after it, and slammed the door. "JFK," I said to the husky woman driver who was wearing a Rangers cap backward. "I know you may find this surprising, coming from a New Yorker, but I'm in a hurry. I'll pay for any tickets, and there's a fifty-buck tip if you can get me to the SwissAir terminal in forty minutes."

  "Yo," she said, and slammed the car into gear.

  As the cab pulled away from the curb, I glanced out the side window and saw Francisco standing outside the entrance to the brown-stone, waving his arms and shouting at me. I couldn't hear him through the glass, but when he pointed to his lips and slowly mouthed the word, I could make it out.

  In-ter-pol.

  "Stop."

  "Hey, mister, you want to get to JFK in forty minutes at this time of day, we don't have a second to spare."

  "It's all right. Just pull over to the curb and wait for me."

  The woman pulled the car over, braked to a stop. I got out, walked quickly back to the brownstone to where Francisco, who had now managed to look even more worried, waited. "Interpol?" I asked.

  My office manager nodded. "An Inspector something—a French name. He says it's extremely urgent."

  I went into the office, picked up the receiver. "Gerard? What's up? I was just on my way to catch a plane to come over there."

  "No, no, Mongo!" the Swiss man said quickly. "You must not come here! My friend, what have you done?!"

  "Actually, Gerard," I said, tapping my fingers impatiently on the desk, "I've been up to quite a few things lately. Why don't you tell me what I've done that prompted this phone call."

  "Mongo, this call is unofficial, from a friend. This is not an Interpol matter, but I've heard from local sources that you've been accused of a serious violation of Swiss law. If you try to enter the country, you will be arrested and detained. You must not come to Switzerland!"

  Chapter 13

  There seemed nothing left to do but wait, and waiting wasn't something I did well. As the hours passed, turning into days, I grew ever more tense and irritable, but I tried not to take it out on Francisco, and I made an effort to appear cheerful and upbeat whenever I was around Margaret, Michael, and Emily. I had once more implored them to come with me to a hospital while there was still a safety margin of time, and they had once again insisted that they wanted to wait until they had rendezvoused with the others on Christmas Eve, a date which seemed to be approaching with the speed of an express train. Margaret had finally agreed to share Michael's and Emily's capsules, and when they had finished dividing them up they each had just enough medication to get them through Christmas Day. There had been one capsule left over, and Sharon Stephens was holding it for them. I assumed the other members of the missing flock were in the same situation, and I didn't think one or two days was nearly enough time for the doctors to do whatever work had to be done.

  An optimistic attitude had always formed the spine of my life, but I had to admit to myself that I did not believe Margaret or any of the other schizophrenics was going to survive.

  There were no more night visitors. The CIA and Lorminix executives had apparently reached the same conclusion I had; all evidence of their wrongdoing would soon be gone.

  I had stopped by the lab, just to make certain it was shuttered and locked, which it was. I had also gone to Bailey's Lower East Side apartment, which I'd found the same way. I'd picked the lock on the door and gone in, just to make sure Bailey wasn't lying dead on the floor, but there was no corpse, and everything had seemed in order. The thermostat had even been turned down, as if Bailey himself had simply gone off on vacation—something I couldn't imagine him doing under the circumstances, unless I had totally misread the man, and this was his idea of a joke on me, payback. Bailey Kramer wasn't dead in his apartment, and I just hoped he wasn't dead anywhere else.

  I kept calling Bailey's apartment, day and night, out of habit more than hope, but the phone continued to ring unanswered. To keep myself busy I plunged into my work, clearing up all the paperwork around the office, rescheduling appointments I'd had Francisco cancel, lining up new business for the New Year.

  And I started to make arrangements for Christmas Eve.

  We would go to Rockefeller Center in the late afternoon, wait a certain length of time that had not been agreed upon yet for the others to show up, and then depart, en masse, to walk the few blocks to the nearest hospital, where I was working, calling in every IOU and using every contact I had, to ensure that a small army of specialists— endocrinologists, cell specialists, internists, and neurologists—would be waiting to try to prevent all these people from bleeding to death in the eye of this brainstorm.

  My feelings about Bailey Kramer ranged from sorrow and guilt at the thought that I might have been responsible for his abduction and death at the hands of kidnappers, to outrage before the possibility that he might have decided the job was too much for him—or he had second thoughts about becoming involved, or he had wanted to get even with me—and had simply walked away from it all without telling me. Yet the cool temperature—an even 55 degrees—in his apartment kept bothering me; it was highly unlikely that any kidnappers intending to kill him would have allowed Bailey to turn down the thermostat so that he could save on fuel bills. It didn't make any sense.

  It wasn't until early morning on the last day, 6:30 a.m. on December 24, as I stared at the dark ceiling above my bed, that a third possibility of what might have happened to him—or, more precisely, where he might have gone—occurred to me. I sat bolt upright in bed, and then, feeling like a fool for not considering this possibility before, I leaped out of bed, quickly pulled on jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and sneakers. I ran out of the apartment, grabbing my parka on the way out, bounded down the stairs past an astonished Veil and another guard, who were conferring on the second-floor landing, to the front door and out to the street. There was no time for talk or explanations.

  Th
e early-morning traffic on Christmas Eve was light, and I knew that cabs at this hour would be scarce; I didn't feel like waiting around for one. Bursting with energy fueled by crazy, desperate renewed hope, I sprinted the several blocks to Frank Lemengello's lab. I arrived at the brick-and-glass one-story building on the corner of 62nd Street thoroughly winded, and I doubled up at the curb, gasping for air until I had caught my breath. As when I had checked before, there were no lights on in the locked building—but that didn't necessarily mean he wasn't there; he could be asleep, or had taken precautions to make sure he didn't announce his presence to police or other passersby with lights on in a laboratory whose sole proprietor was away on vacation.

  I tried the front door, as I had done before, and found it still securely locked with what I assumed was a double, or even triple, dead bolt. Before I went to work on that, I thought I would take a little tour of the perimeter to look for signs of life. I went back down the steps, stepped off the sidewalk to the lawn, and slowly walked on the grass along the north side of the building, looking at all the windows. They were dark. I reached the gravel service driveway at the rear, slowly walked down it, again inspecting each window; all I could see was darkness inside, and the pale, ghostly reflection of the rising winter sun. And then, in the window next to the delivery entrance at the back, I saw what I had hoped to find, something nobody would have seen unless they were looking very closely.

  At the very corner of the window, escaping through a sliver of the alarm-rigged plate glass where the blanket covering the window had slipped loose, was a pencil line of light.

  I bounded up the three steps to the delivery door, used both fists to pound on the steel plate. "Bailey, open up! It's me! Bailey, open the fucking door!"

  After about thirty seconds of more pounding and shouting, the door abruptly swung open, and Bailey Kramer, wearing a surgical cap and mask along with safety goggles and latex gloves, stood in the doorway looking down at me. The flesh of his face that I could see was a study in black on black, with inky, swollen bulges under his soulful eyes, whose whites were streaked with blood-red crimson. I wondered when he had last slept.

  "Put these on and follow me," he said brusquely, handing me a paper cap and mask, latex gloves, and safety goggles. "And don't get in my way."

  I followed him, my heart pounding with excitement and hope, into a large storage and testing room at the back of the building that had been transformed into something that looked like a hybrid of my high school chemistry lab, Dr. Frankenstein's basement, and a moonshiner's still. All of the sophisticated electronic equipment on three long, worn marble-topped worktables had been pushed back and draped, the machines apparently having done their job. The exposed surface of two of the tables was covered with a tangle of Pyrex retorts and beakers of various sizes, all connected to one another by lengths of clear plastic tubing; inside the containers, liquids of different colors and viscosity merrily bubbled away over Bunsen burners. There was a strange, pungent smell in the air that reminded me of a cross between a bakery and a sewage disposal plant. The end result of all this double bubble toil and trouble was something oozing out of a tube connected to a condensation apparatus at the end of one of the tables; viscous pale green gunk was dripping in clots out of the tube onto a ceramic plate, where it almost immediately congealed into a thick paste that had the look and consistency of used bubble gum.

  The third stone-topped table, stretching across the front of the room at a right angle to the others, was being used for what appeared to be a mixing operation. There were a number of different drugs or chemicals in shallow plastic bins separated from one another by partitions of plastic stripping. There was an array of tiny measuring spoons and spatulas, and three finely calibrated electronic scales with digital readouts. At the far end of the table was a small mound of powder that was the same color as the compound inside the capsules. This mound had been further separated into several even smaller mounds of uniform size that were arrayed over a sheet of brown butcher's paper.

  Meds for Margaret and the lost flock.

  One corner of the room had been transformed into a kind of cockroach heaven, a pile of empty pizza boxes, soup cans, paper and plastic takeout food containers, McDonald's and Burger King wrappers, and various other sorts of litter. In the middle of the floor was a folding cot with two army blankets and a pillow without a pillowcase, but it didn't look like it had been used much.

  "Bailey, you've done it?!"

  The chemist grunted and nodded his head. His back was to me as he stood before an autoclave, impatiently drumming his fingers on the side of a ceramic tray containing a mound of the pale green paste. The red warning light on the autoclave was glowing, and I could see from the dial on the front that the autoclave had been set at its lowest temperature; something was cooking inside. "I'm missing one small chain of the molecule, but I don't think it will make a noticeable difference. This stuff should do the trick."

  I donned my cap, mask, gloves, and goggles. "How can I help?"

  "It will be easier for me to show you than try to explain. I'll have a new batch of the key ingredient coming out of the oven in a minute or two. It has to be mixed with the other drugs in a very precise ratio to produce the compound we need. Find paper and a pencil somewhere. I'll give you the precise weights we need of each ingredient as we go along the mixing table together. Those are the final dosages there at the end."

  I went to the front of the building, into Frank's office, and rummaged around in his desk until I found a pad and a ballpoint pen. Then I hurried back to the chemist's aromatic chapel of miracles. He was still waiting in front of the autoclave.

  "For Christ's sake, Bailey. I thought you were dead."

  "Why?" he asked in an absent tone. Bailey Kramer was obviously not a man easily distracted from his work.

  "Why?! Because you didn't call, is why. What the hell was I supposed to think? I was worried about you."

  Now he turned to look at me, and from what I could see of his face he looked genuinely puzzled. "I told you I'd let you know if I couldn't do it. A few days ago I finally cracked the problem, found out I could do it. So I went to work. I've been very busy since our conversation, because I knew there wasn't any time to waste. You said you needed it by Christmas Eve, and that's still a few hours away. We're going to make it."

  "Well, if you weren't concerned about putting my mind at rest, what about your expenses?"

  He shrugged. "There wasn't a lot of time to worry about accounting. There's hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment here, Frederickson, and I really don't know of any place where you can rent it. Also, this isn't exactly the kind of operation you can set up in some loft or church basement. As for the prescription drugs, I had to use Frank's DEA number to order them from a pharmaceuticals supply house. Since he was going to find out what I'd been up to in any case, I figured I might as well go ahead and use his charge account. You can settle with him when he gets back. Obviously, since he was so conveniently vacating this very fine laboratory to go away for the holidays, I figured I'd just move in; everything I needed was here." He paused, and from the way the surgical mask covering his mouth and nose moved I thought he might actually be smiling. "Considering the circumstances and all of the other things that are likely to come down on me as a result of this venture, I figured it would be silly to worry about a little thing like Frank firing me."

  "You're a pisser, Bailey," I said, shaking my head. "My very own mad scientist. You're everybody's last hope. Do you have any idea what I've been going through?"

  "I'm sorry, Frederickson," he said seriously. "I really am. Now that you mention it, I guess I should have called you to let you know where I was and how the work was going. But I told you I didn't know if I could do it until a few days ago, and then I got kind of focused in on the job. When I'm doing something like this, everything else in the world just kind of fades away, doesn't exist for me."

  Well, I certainly couldn't complain about that, and so I didn't
. The bell on the autoclave chimed, and the red light went off. Bailey donned a pair of heavy, insulated mittens over his surgical gloves, opened the door, and removed a black ceramic plate on which there was a small mound of grayish-blue powder. He set that plate down on the mixing table, then returned to the autoclave and put in the plate with the bubble-gum paste. He shut the door, set the timer, pressed a button, and the red light came on again.

  "This is the key ingredient," he continued, pointing to the grayish-blue powder, "the substance I had to replicate in order to make the compound work. The other ingredients are off-the-shelf psychotropics and a tiny amount of binder. I finally broke the chemical code, and then figured out a way to actually make the stuff yesterday afternoon. I've been cooking up the stuff ever since. When you mix all the ingredients in the proper ratios, and then measure it out, you get the brownish powder you see in the proper dosages there at the end of the table. I'm going to show you how to do that. By three or four this afternoon we should have enough dosages of the medication to supply a dozen people for maybe a month. Now that I've figured out how to do it, I can always make more if it's needed. If I'm not in jail, I can probably cook it up in my apartment. You don't need an autoclave; an ordinary kitchen stove will do nicely."