Harvest

by Tess Gerritsen

  She dropped her carry-on bag and ran.

  There were two carousels ahead of her, both of them unused at the moment. She sprinted past them, then darted out the far exit doors.

  She emerged into the windblown night. Off to her left she heard a commotion. The man in the raincoat had just pushed his way out of the other exit. A second man came out a few steps behind him. One of them pointed at Vivian and barked out something incomprehensible.

  Vivian took off, fleeing up the sidewalk. She knew the men were chasing her; she could hear the thud of a luggage cart toppling and the angry shouts of a porter.

  There was a pop, and she felt something flick through her hair.

  A bullet.

  Her heart was banging, her lungs gasping in air thick with bus fumes.

  She saw a doorway ahead. She ducked in it and raced for the nearest escalator. The moving stairs were going the wrong way. She ran up them two at a time. As she reached the upper level, she heard another pop. This time pain sliced her temple, and she felt a dribble of warmth on her cheek.

  The American Airlines ticket counter was straight ahead. It was fully manned, a line of people snaking in front of it.

  She heard footsteps pounding on the escalator behind her. Heard one of the men shouting words she couldn’t understand.

  She sprinted for the ticket counter, bowled over a man and a suitcase dolly, and leaped onto the countertop. Her momentum carried her straight over. She landed on the other side, her body slamming against the luggage loading belt.

  Four astonished airline reps were staring down at her.

  Her legs were shaking as she rose to her feet. Cautiously she peered across the countertop. She saw only a crowd of stunned bystanders. The men had vanished.

  Vivian looked at the reps, who were still frozen in place. “Well, aren’t you going to call Security?”

  Wordlessly, one of the women reached for the phone.

  “And while you’re at it,” said Vivian, “dial nine-one-one.”

  A dark Mercedes crawled along the road and came to a stop beside the phone booth. Abby could just make out the driver’s profile, backlit by the lights of a passing car. It was Tarasoff.

  She ran to the passenger door and climbed inside. “Thank God you’re here.”

  “You must be freezing. Why don’t you take my coat? It’s on the back seat.”

  “Please, just go! Let’s get out of here.”

  As Tarasoff pulled away from the curb, she glanced back to see if anyone was following them. The road behind them was dark.

  “Do you see any cars?” he asked.

  “No. I think we’re okay.”

  Tarasoff released a shaky breath. “I’m not very good at this. I don’t even like to watch crime shows.”

  “You’re doing fine. Just get us to the police station. We can call Vivian to meet us there.”

  Tarasoff glanced nervously in the rearview mirror. “I think I just saw a car.”

  “What?” Abby looked back, but saw nothing.

  “I’m going to turn here. Let’s see what happens.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll keep watching.”

  As they rounded the corner, Abby kept her gaze focused on the road behind them. She saw no headlights, no other cars at all. Only when they slowed to a stop did she turn and face forward. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” Tarasoff cut the headlights.

  “Why are you . . .” Abby’s words froze in her throat.

  Tarasoff had just pressed the lock release button.

  She glanced right in panic as her door swung open. A gust of wind swept in. Suddenly hands reached in and she was being dragged out into the night. Her hair fell across her eyes, obscuring her vision. She fought blindly against her captors but could not succeed in loosening their grips. Her hands were yanked behind her back and the wrists bound together. Her mouth was taped. Then she was lifted and thrust into the trunk of a nearby car.

  The hood slammed shut, trapping her in darkness.

  They were moving.

  She rolled onto her back and kicked upward. Again and again she slammed her feet against the trunk lid, kicking until her thighs ached, until she could scarcely lift her legs. It was useless; no one could hear her.

  Exhausted, she curled up on her side and forced herself to think.

  Tarasoff. How is Tarasoff involved?

  Slowly the puzzle came together, piece by piece. Lying in the cramped darkness, with the road rumbling beneath her, she began to understand. Tarasoff was chief of one of the most respected cardiac transplant teams on the East Coast. His reputation attracted desperately ill patients from around the world, patients with the wherewithal to go to any surgeon they chose. They demanded the best, and they could afford to pay for it.

  What they could not buy, what the system would never allow them to buy, was what they needed to stay alive: hearts. Human hearts

  That’s what the Bayside transplant team could provide. She remembered what Tarasoff had once said: “I refer patients to Bayside all the time.”

  He was Bayside’s go-between. He was their matchmaker.

  She felt the car brake and turn. The tires rolled across gravel, then stopped. There was a distant roar, a sound she recognized as a jet taking off. She knew exactly where they were.

  The trunk hood opened. She was lifted out, into a buffeting wind that smelled of diesel fuel and the sea. They half-carried, half-dragged her down the pier and up the gangplank. Her screams were muffled by the tape over her mouth and lost in the thunder of the jet’s takeoff. She caught only a glimpse of the freighter deck, of shifting blackness and geometric shadows, and then she was dragged below, down steps that rattled and clanged. One flight, then another.

  A door screeched open and she was thrust inside, into darkness. Her hands were still bound behind her back; she could not break her fall. Her chin slammed to the metal floor and the impact was blinding. She was too stunned to move, to utter even a whimper as pain drove like a stake through her skull.

  Another set of footsteps clanged down the stairway. Dimly she heard Tarasoff say: “At least it’s not a total waste. Take the tape off her mouth. We can’t have her suffocating.”

  She rolled onto her back and struggled to focus. She could make out Tarasoff’s silhouette, standing in the faintly lit doorway. She flinched as one of the men bent down and ripped off the tape.

  “Why?” she whispered. It was the only question she could think of. “Why?”

  The silhouette gave a faint shrug, as though her question was irrelevant. The other two men backed out of the room. They were preparing to shut her inside.

  “Is it the money?” she cried. “Is it that simple an answer?”

  “Money means nothing,” Tarasoff said, “if it can’t buy you what you need.”

  “Like a heart?”

  “Like the life of your own child. Or your own wife, your own sister or brother. You, of all people, should understand that, Dr. DiMatteo. We know all about little Pete and his accident. Only ten years old, wasn’t he? We know you’ve lived through your own private tragedy. Think, doctor, what would you have given to have saved your brother’s life?”

  She said nothing. By her silence, he knew her answer.

  “Wouldn’t you have given anything? Done everything?”

  Yes, she thought, and that admission took no reflection at all. Yes.

  “Imagine what it’s like,” he said, “to watch your own child dying. To have all the money in the world and know that she still has to wait her turn in line. Behind the alcoholics and the drug abusers. And the mentally incompetent. And the welfare cheats who haven’t worked a single day in their lives.” He paused. And said, softly, “Imagine.”

  The door swung shut. The latch squealed into place.

  She was lying in pitch darkness. She heard the rattle of the stairway as the three men climbed back to deck level, heard the faint thud of a hatch closing. Then, for a time, she heard only the wind and the groan of the sh
ip straining at its lines.

  Imagine.

  She closed her eyes and tried not to think of Pete. But there he was standing in front of her, proudly dressed in his Cub Scout uniform. She thought of what he’d said when he was five: that Abby was the only girl he wanted to marry. And she thought of how upset he’d been to learn that he could not marry his own sister . . .

  What would I have done to save you? Anything. Everything.

  In the darkness, something rustled.

  Abby froze. She heard it again, the barest whisper of movement. Rats.

  She squirmed away from the sound and managed to rise up onto her knees. She could see nothing, could only imagine giant rodents scurrying on the floor all around her. She struggled to her feet.

  There was a soft click.

  The sudden flare of light flooded her retinas. She jerked backward. A bare bulb swung overhead, clinking softly against the dangling pull-chain.

  It was not a rat she had heard moving in the darkness. It was a boy.

  They stared at each other, neither one of them saying a word. Though he stood very still, she could see the wariness in his eyes. His legs, thin and bare beneath shorts, were tensed for flight. But there was nowhere to run.

  He looked about ten, very pale and very blond, his hair almost silver under the swaying lightbulb. She noticed a bluish smudge on his cheek, and realized with a sudden start of outrage that the smudge was not dirt, but a bruise. His deep-set eyes were like two more bruises in his white face.

  She took a step toward him. At once he backed away. “I won’t hurt you,” she said. “I just want to talk to you.”

  A frown flickered across his forehead. He shook his head.

  “I promise. I won’t hurt you.”

  The boy said something, but his answer was incomprehensible to her. Now it was her turn to frown and shake her head.

  They looked at each other in shared bewilderment.

  Suddenly they both glanced upward. The ship’s engines had just started up.

  Abby tensed, listening to the rattle of chain, the squeal of hydraulics. Moments later, she felt the rocking of the hull as it cut through the water. They had left the dock and were now under way.

  Even if I get out of these bonds, out of this room, there’s nowhere for me to run.

  In despair, she looked back at the boy.

  He was no longer paying any attention to the sound of the engines. Instead, his gaze had dropped to her waist. Slowly he edged sideways and stared at her bound wrists, tucked close to her back. He looked down at his own arm. Only then did Abby see that his left hand was missing, that his forearm ended in a stump. He had held it close to his body, concealing the deformity from her view. Now he seemed to be studying it.

  He looked back at her and spoke again.

  “I can’t understand what you’re saying,” she said.

  He repeated himself, this time with an edge of petulance in his voice. Why couldn’t she understand? What was wrong with her?

  She simply shook her head.

  They regarded each other in mutual frustration. Then the boy lifted his chin. She realized that he had come to some sort of decision. He circled around to her back and tugged at her wrists, trying to loosen the bonds with his one hand. The cord was too tightly knotted. Now he knelt on the floor behind her. She felt the nip of his teeth, the heat of his breath against her skin. As the lightbulb swayed overhead, he began to gnaw, like a small but determined mouse, at her bonds.

  “I’m sorry, but visiting hours are over,” said a nurse. “Wait, you can’t go in there. Stop!”

  Katzka and Vivian walked straight past the nurses’ desk and pushed into Room 621. “Where’s Abby?” demanded Katzka.

  Dr. Colin Wettig turned to look at them. “Dr. DiMatteo is missing.”

  “You told me she’d be watched here,” said Katzka. “You assured me nothing could happen to her.”

  “She was watched. No one came in here without my express orders.”

  “Then what happened to her?”

  “That’s a question you’ll have to ask Dr. DiMatteo.”

  It was Wettig’s flat voice that angered Katzka. That and the emotionless gaze. Here was a man who revealed nothing, a man in control. Staring at Wettig’s unreadable face, Katzka suddenly recognized himself, and the revelation was startling.

  “She was under your care, doctor. What’ve you people done with her?”

  “I don’t like your implications.”

  Katzka crossed the room, grabbed the lapels of Wettig’s lab coat, and shoved him backward against the wall. “Goddamn you,” he said, “Where did you take her?”

  Wettig’s blue eyes at last betrayed a flicker of fear. “I told you, I don’t know where she is! The nurses called me at six-thirty to tell me she was gone. We’ve alerted Security. They’ve already searched the hospital but they can’t find her.”

  “You know where she is, don’t you?”

  Wettig shook his head.

  “Don’t you?” Katzka gave him another shove.

  “I don’t know!” gasped Wettig.

  Vivian stepped forward and tried to pull them apart. “Stop it! You’re choking him! Katzka, let him go!”

  Abruptly Katzka released Wettig. The older man swayed backward against the wall, breathing heavily. “I thought, given her delusional state, she’d be safer in the hospital.” Wettig straightened and rubbed his neck where the collar of the lab coat had left a bright red strangulation mark. Katzka stared at the mark, shocked by the evidence of his own violence.

  “I didn’t realize,” said Wettig, “that she might be telling the truth after all.” Wettig pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to Vivian. “The nurses just gave that to me.”

  “What is it?” said Katzka.

  Vivian frowned. “This is Abby’s blood alcohol level. It says here it’s zero.”

  “I had it redrawn this afternoon and sent to an independent lab,” Wettig explained. “She kept insisting she hadn’t been intoxicated. I thought, if I could confront her with undeniable evidence, that I could break through her denial . . .”

  “This result is from an outside lab?”

  Wettig nodded. “Completely independent of Bayside.”

  “You told me her alcohol was point two-one.”

  “That was the one done at four A.M. in Bayside’s lab.”

  Vivian said, “The half-life of blood alcohol ranges anywhere from two to fourteen hours. If it was that high at four A.M., then this test should show at least a trace left.”

  “But there’s no alcohol in her system,” said Katzka.

  “Which tells me that either her liver is amazingly fast at metabolizing it,” said Wettig, “or Bayside’s lab made a mistake.”

  “Is that what you’re calling it?” said Katzka. “A mistake?”

  Wettig said nothing. He looked drained. And very old. He sat down on the rumpled bed. “I didn’t realize . . . didn’t want to consider the possibility . . .”

  “That Abby was telling the truth?” said Vivian.

  Wettig shook his head. “My God,” he murmured. “This hospital should be shut down. If what she’s been saying is true.”

  Katzka felt Vivian’s gaze. He looked at her.

  She said, softly: “Now do you have any doubts?”

  For hours the boy had slept in her arms, his breath puffing out warm whispers against her neck. He lay limp, arms and legs askew, the way children do when they are deeply, trustingly asleep. He had been shivering when she’d first embraced him. She’d massaged his bare legs, and it was like rubbing cold, dry sticks. Eventually his shaking had stopped, and as his breathing slowed, she’d felt that flush of warmth that children give off when they finally fall asleep.

  She, too, slept for a while.

  When she woke up, the wind was blowing harder. She could hear it in the groaning of the ship. Overhead, the bare lightbulb swayed back and forth.

  The boy whimpered and stirred. There was something touc
hing about the smell of young boys, she thought, like the scent of warm grass. Something about the sweet androgyny of their bodies. She remembered how her brother Pete had felt, sagging against her shoulder as he slept in the backseat of the family car. For miles and miles, while their father drove, Abby had felt the gentle drumming of Pete’s heart. Just as she was feeling this boy’s heart now, beating in its cagelike chest.

  He gave a soft moan and shuddered awake. Looking up at her, recognition slowly dawned in his eyes.

  “Ah-bee,” he whispered.

  She nodded. “That’s right. Abby. You remembered.” Smiling, she stroked his face, her finger tracing across the bruise. “And you’re . . . Yakov.”

  He nodded.

  They both smiled.

  Outside, the wind groaned and Abby felt the floor rock beneath them. Shadows swayed across the boy’s face. He was watching her with an almost hungry look.

  “Yakov,” she said again. She brushed her mouth across one silky blond eyebrow. When she lifted her head, she felt the wetness on her lips. Not the boy’s tears, but hers. She turned her face against her shoulder to wipe away the tears. When she looked back at him, she saw he was still watching her with that strange, rapt silence of his.

  “I’m right here,” she murmured. And, smiling, she brushed her fingers through his hair.

  After a while his eyelids drifted shut and his body relaxed once again into the trusting limpness of sleep.

  “So much for the search warrant,” said Lundquist, and he kicked the door. It flew open and banged against the wall. Cautiously he edged into the room and froze. “What the fuck is all this?”

  Katzka flipped on the wall switch.

  Both men blinked as light flooded their eyes. It shone down with blinding intensity from three overhead lamps. Everywhere Katzka looked, he saw gleaming surfaces. Stainless steel cabinets. Instrument trays and IV poles. Monitors studded with knobs and switches.

  In the center of the room was an operating table.

  Katzka approached the table and stared down at the straps hanging from the sides. Two for the wrists, two for the ankles, two longer straps for the waist and chest.