Count to Ten

by James Patterson

  There came a noise. From her right.

  “Mama, it’s me”—and Maya appeared from a side room, a tiny, shaking, frightened thing, but alive and unharmed.

  “Oh my God, baby, are you all right?” Nisha rushed for her and gathered her up, tears of relief streaming down her cheeks.

  “Yes, Mama, I’m all right. The good man came and saved me from the bad man.”

  Instantly Nisha was alert again, gun up. “What good man? Where?”

  “He’s in there.” Pointing back toward the room she’d just left.

  “Stay there, honey, stay there,” said Nisha then hit the door, rolling into a study and coming up once again with the .38 in two hands. The window was open and in the distance she could see a man in black running back down along the drive toward the gates.

  In a second she was out of the door, down the entrance hall, and out of the front door, scrunching on the gravel, finding the fleeing man in her sights as she took a wide-legged, two-handed stance and shouted, “Freeze! You in the black! Freeze or I’m putting you down!”

  From behind, Maya screeched, “No, Mama, don’t hurt him!” and Nisha found herself with a split-second decision to make as the running man veered off the approach road and into the undergrowth: should she fire on the man who’d saved her daughter? Hurt him? Risk killing him, even?

  Or let him go?

  “Freeze!” she shouted again, uselessly. The moment was gone.

  She had let the killer go.

  Nisha lowered her gun, trying to tell herself the only thing that mattered was Maya, trying to convince herself that she hadn’t just allowed a serial killer to escape.

  Chapter 77

  THE NURSES ASSURED Jack and Neel that it would take up to twenty-four hours before they would know whether Santosh would pull through.

  Together, the two Private men left the treatment room, trudged out into a waiting area, and took a seat, reluctant to leave just yet: the quintessential American, complete with stubble and polo shirt open at the neck; the sharp-dressed young Indian man—side by side, each lost in his own thoughts.

  Not for the first time Jack asked after Nisha. Where had she got to?

  Neel shrugged. “Perhaps she’s still looking for us in the morgue.”

  At the same time his eyes traveled to a TV mounted on the opposite wall. The news was showing. Live coverage of the sensational Roy revelations. In the foreground a journalist with a microphone delivered her report, evidently live from Roy’s home. As they watched, the reporter turned to indicate what looked like a scene of devastation behind.

  “Oh my God,” said Neel. “That’s my car.”

  Chapter 78

  YAMUNA PUSHTA WAS the embankment on both sides of the Yamuna river, stretching from the ITO Bridge up to the Salimgarh Fort. It was home to a string of slum colonies and clusters of shanties.

  Iqbal Ibrahim, aka Dr. O. S. Rangoon, did not bother to get out of the van. All his meetings happened inside. It was his office. Instead, one of Ibrahim’s henchmen walked into the largest hut and informed the slumlord that his boss had arrived.

  The slumlord was a shifty-eyed man with a permanent trickle of betel-nut juice at the corner of his mouth. He was master of all the expanse of tin roofs and blue tarpaulins that dotted the Yamuna banks and he ruled his kingdom with an iron fist. Rent had to be paid on the first of each month, failing which a dweller’s meager possessions would be confiscated. If rent remained unpaid after a week, the occupant would be thrown out along with his family. Desperate families would cry piteously as they were thrown out, ready to do almost anything in order to be allowed to stay.

  The slumlord quickly gathered his papers and entered Ibrahim’s van. “Al-salaam alaykum,” he said, sitting down on one of the visitors’ chairs offered by Ibrahim, who was wearing a new green skullcap.

  “Wa-alaykum al-salaam,” replied Ibrahim. “So, who are your tenants who haven’t paid their rent on time?”

  “There are always a few,” replied the slumlord.

  “Inshallah, we can clear up your dues efficiently,” said Ibrahim, winking.

  At a safe distance, the man who had kept Ibrahim under surveillance for several weeks continued to make notes. It was becoming evident to him that Ibrahim was a resource worth recruiting.

  The slumlord laughed, his betel-nut spittle splattering Ibrahim’s desk. “What is the exchange rate for a kidney these days?” he asked.

  “Two livers,” replied Ibrahim matter-of-factly. “Or three hearts, or four hundred liters of blood. What do you have to offer?”

  “I’ll show you, shall I?” grinned the slumlord.

  He made a call. Five minutes later two of his men appeared, carrying a younger man slumped between them.

  Chapter 79

  THE YOUNG MAN recovered consciousness from the blow that had knocked him out and realized he was lying on the bed that was part of Ibrahim’s mobile hospital. He had been arguing with the slumlord when one of the thugs surrounding him had delivered a knock to the back of his head. He had lost consciousness and crumpled to the floor. Now in front of him stood a stranger dressed in scrubs, surgical mask, and gloves.

  “What have you done to me?” he whimpered.

  “Nothing yet,” replied the masked doctor. “We just took some blood and ran a test to check your blood type. I have good news. You’re a match.”

  “What does that mean?” asked the man.

  “It means that we can now operate on you,” said Ibrahim, emerging from behind his desk, “remove one of your healthy kidneys, settle what you owe to your landlord, and, inshallah, still leave you with a tidy pile of cash—fifty thousand rupees—for the future.”

  Fifty thousand rupees. This to a poor man who toiled at a construction site. Work had dried up owing to bad weather and he could no longer pay rent for the mud-and-tin shack he occupied along with his wife and three children.

  Fifty thousand rupees.

  “Will I live?” he asked.

  “Sure,” replied the doctor. “I’ll give you a shot to knock you out. When you wake up it’ll all be over. Just remember that if you tell anyone what happened to you, we’ll find you and we’ll kill you. Is that clear?”

  The patient swallowed, eyes swiveling in fear.

  “Stop worrying,” insisted the surgeon. “I’ve done this many times. If anyone does an MRI later, they will find that the surgery has been done professionally and that the kidney has been removed with precision.”

  The surgeon didn’t bother to reveal that all his surgeries had been carried out without a medical license. He had flunked his final year at med school and was only qualified to perform autopsies. He worked part-time for Ibrahim and spent the rest of his time disposing of corpses at Delhi Memorial Hospital.

  The patient nodded. He looked at the bodyguard who was standing at the door of the van. If he tried to get up and run, he knew he would be shot. He had never seen fifty thousand rupees in his entire life. One kidney was a small price to pay for a large sum.

  Ibrahim could see the cogs turning inside the man’s head. He knew that the seven hundred and fifty dollars he paid the man would be recovered twenty times over by the time he sold it off. This chap’s kidney was of a rare blood type, and there was a specific patient on the United Network for Organ Sharing database who had been told he would have to wait eight years for a matching kidney owing to his rare blood type. He would pay a handsome price to get it from Ibrahim.

  “Will it hurt, sir?” asked the patient.

  “Not during surgery,” replied the surgeon. “You’ll be knocked out. But when you regain consciousness, you will have pain in your lower abdomen. That will take some time to go but we will give you painkillers to manage it. We will also transfer you to a guesthouse on the outskirts of Delhi so that you can stay there for a few days in order to recover.”

  Chapter 80

  “I WANT TO see my daughter now, please,” said Nisha, steel in her voice. “You’ve had more than enough time to interview
her.”

  Two hours, to be precise. Sharma’s assistant, Nanda, had spent the time reviewing events with Nisha, increasingly frustrated at what he claimed was her lack of cooperation. The truth was, she was hiding nothing. But that didn’t stop the insinuations, the suspicions.

  “Now,” she said, slamming a fist to the interview-room table. “I want to see her now.”

  Nanda stared at her awhile, just to show her who was boss, that he wouldn’t be ordered around by her. Then with a nod to the duty officer he let himself out of the interview suite and Nisha settled down to wait.

  After twenty minutes or so—a decent enough show-her-who’s-boss interval—the door opened once more, this time to admit Maya, followed by Sharma.

  The interview-suite chair scraped as Nisha stood and rushed around the table, kneeling to take Maya in her arms. “Sweetie, I’m sorry. There was nothing I could do about that. Were they nice? Were they nice to you?”

  “The lady looking after me was nice,” said Maya, then shot a baleful look at Sharma.

  “I was doing my job, Mrs. Gandhe,” said Sharma. “Take a seat, would you? My colleague Nanda told me you’ve been about as much use as she has: ‘He wore a mask. He was disguising his voice.’ ”

  “Then what else do you expect? What else can we tell you?”

  They were all sitting now, Sharma huge on the opposite side of the table, filling the room with the stink of smoke, sweating with agitation and last night’s whisky. “What I want to know is why when Mommy was pointing her gun at the bad man she didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “He wasn’t a bad man,” blurted Maya suddenly. “He was a good man.”

  Sharma’s eyebrows shot up. “A good man, eh? Do you want to know what he did to Mr. Kumar, or Mr. Patel, or Mr. Roy? Shall I tell you?”

  “Commissioner!” warned Nisha, beginning to rise from her seat.

  “Sit down,” warned Sharma.

  “He was about to hurt me,” said Maya. Her eyes shone with tears and her voice shook. “He was about to do really, really horrible things to me. I know the kind of things. Things you hear about on the news when children go missing and their bodies are found. Things like that. And the man in black stopped him, and I don’t care if he killed him because it serves the bad man right. It serves him right for what he was going to do to me and what he’s done to other children.”

  Sharma sat back. His eyes were hooded. To Nisha he said, “Quite a chip off the old block, isn’t she?”

  “She’s been through a lot.”

  “Is that why you didn’t take him down? You think he’s a good man, do you?”

  Nisha leaned forward. “Listen. I used to be a cop, just the same as you. And like you I don’t discriminate. A killer is a killer.”

  “Even if he’s a hit man with a heart of gold?”

  “That’s what you think this guy is, do you?”

  “What about you? What do you think?”

  She sighed and threw up her hands. “Oh, come on! This is getting us nowhere, Commissioner. We’ve told you everything we know. If you don’t plan to charge us with anything, then I’ll thank you to let us go. My daughter has been through a terrible ordeal.”

  “Charge you? What did you think I might charge you with?”

  “I don’t know. You can think of something. Criminal damage on Roy’s gates…”

  Sharma nodded. “Yes. Maybe that. Or maybe aiding and abetting.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, Commissioner. You’re reaching. This is ridiculous.”

  Now it was his turn to sit forward. “Who’s employing Private, Mrs. Gandhe? It wouldn’t be Mohan Jaswal, by any chance, would it? You know full well that I report to Ram Chopra and that Ram Chopra and Mohan Jaswal aren’t exactly the best of pals.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “I’d watch yourselves if I were you. That’s all it is. You tell that to your friends at Private. You tell them that I think you, Mrs. Gandhe, deliberately allowed a serial killer to escape. You tell them that the next victim’s blood is on your hands.”

  Moments later, Nisha and Maya emerged into reception, where Jack and Neel were waiting.

  “Santosh?” she said.

  Jack grimaced, looking tired. “Well, first we hoped he was alive, and then we thought he was dead, and then we hoped he might come alive again, and now we’re not sure. I think that’s about the size of it.”

  Nisha put her hands over Maya’s ears. “For fuck’s sake, is he alive or is he dead?”

  “What Jack’s saying is right,” Neel assured her. “The prognosis is good. We’re hopeful he’ll make it.”

  “Thank God,” she said, then shot an apologetic look at them both, particularly Neel. “I’m sorry about your car,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about the car, we’ll cover the car,” said Jack. “Also, Nisha, I’ll put you and Maya up in the Oberoi until you feel comfortable moving back into your own home and…” he held out his hands, “there’s no rush, no rush at all. You take your time.”

  Privately, Nisha wondered if she and Maya would ever be able to move back into the apartment.

  “In the meantime, I think we have another theory to work on,” she said.

  “Let’s hear it,” said Jack.

  Nisha glanced back to where the desk sergeant sat behind glass, engrossed on the phone. “I don’t think this is some kind of organized-crime war we’re talking about. I don’t think our guy is a hit man; I think he’s a vigilante.”

  Part Three

  Martyr

  Chapter 81

  DEATH IS THE great equalizer. The Deliverer had seen hundreds of corpses being cremated at the burning ghats as he grew up in Varanasi. From ashes to ashes, from dust to dust. It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, king or beggar, saint or sinner. The River Ganges could wash away your sins, and if you were cremated by its banks, you could also be guaranteed salvation if your ashes were immersed in the river. Instant moksha.

  After he had killed the priest, the Deliverer had run to the Ganges to bathe and wash off his sins. He had taken up the worst job—that of a “Dom.” Cremations occurred at the burning ghats throughout the day and night. After the cremation, the leftovers would be immersed into the river by the chief mourner, usually the son of the deceased. The bones did not burn completely, so the Doms were responsible for collecting the remaining bone fragments and immersing them in the river. It was a sickening and filthy job. The smell of death had seemed to permanently attach itself to his skin, no matter how many times he took a dip.

  One day a young army captain had arrived at the burning ghats in order to cremate his father. He’d noticed the boy scavenging for bones when the cremation was over. The captain’s heart had gone out to the boy doing that despicable job. He’d pulled him aside and asked him his name.

  “Deliverer,” the boy had replied.

  “Well, Deliverer, do you go to school or do you simply deliver?” the army man had asked. “What do your parents do?”

  “My parents are dead,” the boy had replied without any expression. “I work here to earn enough to feed myself.”

  The army captain had taken the boy to the cantonment school and convinced the reluctant headmaster to accept him. It would be a tough slog with this one. It had taken several days just to get him clean. When food had been placed on his plate in the canteen, he had eaten ravenously like a dog, almost immersing his face in the plate. Not surprisingly, he had been picked on by one of the seniors, a cruel bully.

  One day he’d found that his plate had been replaced with a dog bowl. The bully and his friends had been shouting “Woof! Woof!” as the boy looked at the bowl. He had been desperately hungry, so he’d eaten from the bowl, ignoring the howls of laughter from the bully and his friends.

  At night, when he’d retired in the dormitory, he had made sure all the boys were asleep before pulling out a small fork—much smaller than an ordinary dining fork—from under his mattress. It had been pr
esented to him by a wandering sadhu who’d been happy with the respect the boy had shown toward him.

  The sadhu had explained to him all the intricacies of different types of poisons and the different ways by which human life could be expended—stabbing, decapitating, shooting, strangling, drowning, poisoning, and burning. The knowledge had been delivered with a disclaimer, though: that human life was a gift and should never be taken unjustly.

  The fork that the sadhu had given him was no ordinary fork. A vegetable extract known as Abrus precatorius was mixed with powdered glass, opium, datura, onion, and alcohol to create a thick paste. Sharp spikes were then fashioned out of this paste by drying them in the sun. Once hardened, two spikes measuring less than two centimeters each would be mounted on a wooden handle to create the fork. The distance between the two mounted needles was carefully calibrated to resemble the fangs of a viper.

  The Deliverer had crept up to the bully’s bed and plunged the fork into his thigh. The bully had screamed in agony but the lights of the dormitory had been off. The Deliverer had retrieved the fork and crawled back to his bed, pretending to be asleep. By the time the lights had been switched on a few minutes later, the bully had been writhing in agony.

  He had been quickly transferred to the Army Hospital and was declared dead from snake bite—a common occurrence in Varanasi—six hours later.

  The Indian Machiavelli, Chanakya, had said in 300 B.C.E., “Even if a snake is not venomous, it should pretend to be so.”

  The Deliverer had stopped pretending. He knew he was venomous.

  Chapter 82

  SANTOSH LAY PROPPED up on his hospital bed, with Jack, Nisha, and Neel at his bedside. A nurse popped in to check his blood pressure and temperature then left. It had taken almost an entire day for him to emerge from his near-dead state.