I rifled through Missoula’s pockets, removing a cell phone and a BlackBerry. Then I opened the door to the cold room. Felt like a February day in Atlanta.
“No,” Missoula protested. His skin had gone gray.
“Yes,” I replied, shoving him inside the small room, amongst the stainless-steel racks full of ELISA kits, reagents, and cell media, the other things that needed to be kept cold but not frozen. “If you’re telling me the truth, I’m sorry. If you’re not telling me the truth, I’ll be back. And I’ll be pissed off.”
The door closed with a heavy thunk.
On the door’s outside handle, a pin dangled from a short chain. I dropped the pin through its hole, locking the mechanism. Not wanting to come back and find a hypothermic scientist, I hit a button on the temperature control, raising the environment to 22 degrees Celsius, a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Dan Missoula would survive. The antibodies and ELISA kits would not.
Missoula’s phone and BlackBerry went into a waste can.
I scanned the hallway, half expecting to see Michael Kwong bearing down on me with guns blazing, knives flashing. But the hallway was empty.
I limped from the lab and used Missoula’s keycard to enter his office suite. A light shone from one of the offices. Alex’s. I heard nothing.
Gun drawn, I stepped to the open office door. Her fingers froze over her laptop’s keyboard, and she stared at me, a look of total surprise and dismay on her face.
And, with that look, I knew what the deal was. I knew it was not to buy time, then to tackle Uncle Tony and his gang or Dustin Alberts and his. I was not to be brought in as a partner in Alex’s little scheme; I was to be sacrificed. That part of the plan—from its very inception with Murph—had never been changed.
For a moment, neither of us moved. Then Alex’s eyes cut quickly to the screen. Her fingers began to tap on the keyboard.
“Don’t,” I told her.
“This isn’t what you think,” she said. “I’m trying to help you, Nate.”
“You tried to help me a few times already today. Stand up.”
Her fingers began to work. I jumped to the desk and slammed the laptop shut. Alex yanked back her hands and let out a little cry.
“What are you doing?” she said. “I was getting documents together for—”
“Shut up, Alex.”
Her mind was scrambling for a way out of this. “—to help your story—”
“Shut up.”
“—but maybe we should just go to the police. I have more than enough to take to the police, Nate.”
I let her go on, since the verbal spray wasn’t going to stop no matter how many times I told her to can it.
“We’ll do this now,” she bargained. “They were threatening me, Nate. They said that if I didn’t help, they’d do the same thing to me as they did to Paul. But now we have the upper hand. We do. Think about it. I’ll talk to Dustin and I’m sure he’ll cut you in. You’ll be a very rich—”
“You knew Kwong was coming for the boy. At the motel. You knew.”
“I did,” she whined. “That’s why I tried to get you to help us before—”
“Where’s Dorothy?” I asked.
“I…I don’t know,” she stammered. “Nate—”
And to my astonishment, I slapped her. Hard. My palm blazed with pain.
Her hand went to her face. And from the expression in her eyes, I had no doubt this woman would have loved nothing more than to see me sliced apart on a sheet of plastic.
“The animal facility,” she answered.
“Where is it?”
“Basement. Left side of the loading dock.”
“Stand up. Open the door.” Alex did, and I followed her into the hallway. “Into the labs. Use your keycard.”
She crossed the hall to the lab door, swiped the card. With the gun at her back, I moved her toward the cold room.
“Stop here,” I said. “Hands on the wall.”
She complied. I rifled through her pockets, removed her cell, took her keycard, dropped them both on the lab bench.
“Don’t be stupid, Nate,” she spat. Man, this woman could change tactics faster than a special-ops team. “What are you going to do to me?” she demanded.
I looked at the cold room, saw Dan Missoula’s pasty face pressed against the small window, blurred behind the thick glass. “I thought you two might want to sing some Harvard fight songs.”
117
FROM THE FIFTH FLOOR, THE moon splashed the landscape below me in monochrome. I could see the fountain where Tim had collected his wishes. Around it, the three silver buildings glinted coldly, the signage across their façades the only dash of color in a dark world.
I fingered the pistol in my hand and realized how ludicrous this was. A gun? Nate McCormick toting a gun? And what was I going to do with it? Shoot it out with a bunch of psychopaths?
I thought of the oath I had taken, first to do no harm.
I thought of Murph, believing his gun would protect him.
I thought of situations spinning out of control, of the weapon being wrested from me, of bullets flying—into me, into Dorothy, into Tim. Get real for once, Dr. McCormick.
I tossed the gun into the trash.
There was a telephone on the lab bench. I picked it up. Could not punch the keys.
Do it, I told myself. Call the cops.
And then what? The sirens wail. Kwong and Uncle Tony and whoever else keep Dorothy and Tim as their bargaining chips. And me? I sit on the outside with the SWAT team praying they can get inside before knives cut into Dorothy’s flesh.
I placed the phone back in its cradle.
They would expect me to run. They would expect me to call the police. They would not expect me to limp around Tetra on a fool’s mission to find Dorothy and Tim. Which is exactly what I was going to do. Truly, a fool’s mission.
I removed Fang’s black pouch from my jacket, unzipped it. There was a syringe with the needle still attached. I drew up a few more cc’s of potassium chloride, enough to kill a horse. This was all very grim stuff, and I tried not to think about endpoints or implications, about the fact that I was preparing this for my own suicide.
I recapped the needle and slid the syringe into my pocket, pushed the pouch, needles, and empty vial into the trash.
As I moved toward the door, I heard the sound of footfalls—heavy slaps, as though someone were running.
Quickly, I ducked into the cell culture room and pressed myself against the door. The familiar odor of cell media—organic, sweet—filled my nostrils; the microbicidal UV light suffused the room. I shut my eyes against it.
There was a beep and a click, and I heard the door to the lab swing open.
Though I could not see him, I knew it was Kwong. I willed deafness on Dan Missoula and Alex Rodriguez. If they heard the door, if they knew someone besides myself was there, if they began to pound on the walls of the cold room…
The door closed. Silence. Then I heard the faint scrape of the door across the hall—the door to Dan and Alex’s office suite—as it opened.
I pushed out of the cell culture room and crawled across the lab, listening, my heart hammering. I heard a door close, then the sound of footfalls fading.
The ring of a phone split the silence.
Disoriented by the sound, I reached into my jacket pocket, but found no phone. I forced myself to calm down and concentrate. The sound was faint, not as loud as I’d thought. A musical trill. Not a lab phone.
I scrambled toward the lab bench and retrieved Alex’s cell. Caller ID said, simply, “MK.” Michael Kwong.
I hit Talk.
“Where you now?” the accented voice asked.
“I’m on the sixth floor, you prick,” I lied. “Waiting for you.”
118
IN THE CORRIDOR, I ADVANCED, hugging the wall as I moved. “Advanced.” I liked that. Made me seem tougher. God knows I needed as much toughness as I could get.
To the stairs.
I paused
, stiffened my left leg, let it fall to the first step. On impact, pain shot, but didn’t cripple. Not thinking, I relaxed the injured knee, let it take the full weight of my body as I tried to work my way over the stairs.
Again, pain shot. This time it was crippling
The leg buckled. My arms flailed toward the railing, tangling themselves around the tubular steel. I heard myself cry out, tried to bite off the sound as it broke from my lips. The echo of my voice off the concrete walls seemed to go on forever.
I listened, heard only my breathing.
For an instant, I considered limping back to the elevators, but dismissed the idea when I imagined Kwong working his way floor by floor from above. Tensing against the pain, I managed to get my legs under me. I gripped the railing on either side of the stairwell, held myself like a pendulum frozen midway through its arc. The palm of my frostbitten left hand stung. My left eye watered. My ruined cheek throbbed.
“One,” I said. “Two, three.”
I tipped my weight forward and stopped myself, afraid now.
“Okay. Four, five.”
I kept my body stiff as I swung my legs forward and dropped myself two steps below. There was pain, but it was tolerable. I slid my hands down the rails, swung my legs a second time. Each clunk of my feet on the concrete steps sounded like a cannon shot.
Five flights like that. Clunk, clunk, clunk.
I could almost feel Michael Kwong’s breath on my neck.
Exhausted, I pushed into the basement corridor.
Affixed to the wall opposite the stairwell was a sign directing me to the animal facility. Ahead, I saw a set of locked doors decorated with red-lettered warning signs. A black card-access box jutted from the wall. I swiped Missoula’s card and pushed through. A blast of air hit me from both sides as I entered into an antechamber. Another set of doors here, another black pad.
I inched the door open.
The odor of cedar and food, bodies and feces hung in the air. A stainless-steel washbasin with foot pedals for water was to my right. Next to it sat a cart with gowns, gloves, booties, masks. Everything you’d need to protect yourself from contamination by the rats, mice, and rabbits that lived there. Or, more importantly, to protect the rats, mice, and rabbits from contamination by you.
Slowly now, I moved along a polished concrete floor, over small brass drains set into it. The walls here were pink, not the beige of the outside corridors, and interrupted every few feet by green-and red-lettered signs exhorting clean practices, posters detailing the proper treatment of animals. Inset into a metal door on my right was a tiny window. Through it, dimly lit, I could see hundreds of stacked cages housing hundreds of mouse colonies. Against the woodchip bedding of the cages, thousands of small forms stirred, as if the room itself were alive. An identical door on my left led to the rats; the next, to the rabbits.
Ten paces down the hall was a windowless door, not as solid as the others. I stepped toward it.
Behind me, I heard a blast of air, quickly followed by the sound of metal scraping.
I wheeled around.
“She scream very much, Dr. McCormick.”
119
“SHE DON’T LIKE THIS AT ALL,” Michael Kwong said. He breathed heavily. Sweat matted the front of his shirt to his chest. In his right hand was a large pistol, raised to my chest. In his left, he held a crumpled white cloth.
“Where’s Dorothy?” I said. “Where is Tim?”
Kwong took a few steps forward. “She beg for you to help.”
“Where are they?”
In answer, he tossed the cloth. It traced a low arc and landed in front of me. I stooped to pick it up; it was soaked with blood.
The white cotton fell open in my hands. Inside, I saw a fingertip severed at the first knuckle, the nail painted with chipped pink polish.
“She have nine more, Dr. McCormick,” Michael Kwong said. “And the boy have ten.”
“Walk.”
I stepped forward, moving down the hall with a pistol stuck in the small of my back. When we reached the windowless door, Kwong said to me, “Open.”
I took hold of the knob and pushed.
Tony was speaking into a phone. He sat on a functional chair at a functional Formica table surrounded by more functional chairs. A microscope attached to a video monitor sat in the corner of the room. Dark green slide-storage cabinets were pushed against one wall. The walls—the same pink as in the corridors—were adorned with cheaply framed prints of animals—mostly reproductions of antique drawings of mice, dogs, birds. A desk and chair abutted one wall.
Tony hung up the phone.
Dorothy was not here. But, goddamn it, Tim Kim was.
Tim stared at me with a “holy shit” look on his pale face. Arrayed on a blue cloth in front of him was an assortment of two dozen or so medical instruments: tweezers, hemostats, clamps, De-Bakey forceps. There were also a few bone shears and rongeurs, thick tools that looked like wire cutters. Whatever they’d used to cut off Dorothy’s finger probably came from this set.
In his hand, Tim held a seven-inch pair of sharp-tipped forceps and was midway through picking up the corner of the cloth when I’d entered. He let the cloth drop.
In times of stress, it’s easier, I suppose, to fiddle around with an orthopedic surgery tray than to concentrate on The Hobbit.
“You have made the situation more complicated than it needed to be, Dr. McCormick,” Tony said. His eyes flickered over the bloodied cloth in my hand. “You have forced us to resort to measures we regret.”
“Your niece,” I said. “Your own niece.”
“She has made sacrifices,” Tony replied. “We all have.”
In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to destroy. Cleanse the world of these men. I wanted to take the bone shears and remove parts of them, cause as much pain as I knew how.
Instead, I set the cloth and the finger onto the table, then returned my hands to my sides. Tony reached out and, pinching an edge of the cloth, slid the bundle toward him.
I’d be damned, though, if I was going to let them control everything.
While Tony was distracted with his niece’s digit, I slipped my hands into my pockets, got the fingers of my right hand around Wei-jan Fang’s syringe.
Kwong jabbed the barrel of his gun into my spine, causing me to stumble forward. “Hand out,” he said.
Slowly, I removed my hands from my pockets, the syringe tucked into the cuff of my right sleeve. I kept my wrist bent to prevent it from sliding out.
Tim’s eyes were wide, fixed on the severed finger.
“No more of this,” I said.
Tony regarded the finger. “There will be no more, Dr. McCormick, if you do as we wish.” He stood. “And what we wish is for you to make your telephone calls,” he said. “We wish you to sign some documents.” Sign some documents. Innocent, like closing on a house, or putting your John Hancock on a 401(k) form for work.
I looked at the finger on the table, at its ragged, glistening end, its wrinkled white flesh. By that time, Tim had turned his gaze from the finger to his great-uncle. His jaw was set now, his eyes narrow. It was the same furious look I’d seen when we were in the pet store.
Tony swept the finger into his hand, and placed it in the pocket of his suit coat. “We would like for my niece to be able to continue her journalism career,” Tony said. We both knew, of course, he was lying.
“What documents?” I asked.
“Your authorization for wire transfers. For your money, Dr. McCormick.” Tony smiled.
This money, I knew, would not go into my account to help me buy that place in Santa Barbara. The money would go into my account to establish my complicity in this mess. The conspiracy was not to be only Wei-jan Fang and Paul Murphy, but Fang, Murphy, and McCormick. And after I’d become a de jure conspirator, I knew they couldn’t take a chance on me saying anything else ever again. The money would sit untouched in its account as beetles chewed through my flesh in some shallow grave.
&nb
sp; “You won’t hurt Brooke,” I bargained weakly.
“There is no reason for us to harm anyone if you comply with our wishes.”
“What about the boy?”
“If you comply, Dr. McCormick, the boy will be fine.”
On that point, I was unsure whether to trust him. Kids don’t forget things like this. Kids grow up. Vengeful boys become vengeful men. They become dangerous.
The furious look on Tim’s face hadn’t changed. Play along with them, I wanted to say. For once, damn it, play along.
“Dorothy?” I croaked.
“A boy needs a mother,” Tony said matter-of-factly.
Despite his game face, I got the sense he was not thrilled about what he’d had to do to his niece. Dorothy was tainted, sure, but she was family. She had betrayed him with Murph—which perhaps could be forgiven—but then she had betrayed him again with me. And she would, given the chance, do it again. He knew that, which is why I was sure things would not end well for her. How bad they would end was up for grabs.
I focused on Uncle Tony: family man, businessman, maker of difficult decisions, killer. He probably wasn’t a sociopath, but he lived with one fucked-up value system.
Tony said something to Kwong in Chinese. Kwong rounded behind me to the side of the table opposite Tim. He leaned toward the collection of medical instruments and removed from it a pair of bone shears.
“You won’t need those,” I said.
“Just in case,” Tony answered, as Kwong took his position behind me. The tattooed man shoved me toward the door. I could hear him breathing.
A feeling of unreality hit me. Murph’s eyeless face, blood sheeting from his mouth like a bib, loomed in front of me. His dying wife, frothing from the gash in her neck. The slit throats of the children. The finger with pink nail polish.
How had Dorothy felt as metal passed through flesh and bone?
What would the blades feel like as they pressed through mine?
As I limped forward I allowed the syringe to fall into my palm, squeezed the needle’s cap between thumb and forefinger, and twisted it off. A cowardly way out, I know, but preferable to having my ears sliced off, my fingers cut off.
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