Critical

by Robin Cook

  “The sooner, the better,” Michael said. “Sorry to bother you, and I wouldn’t have done so it if wasn’t important.”

  “Well, suit yourself, Mikey, but don’t dillydally. The later it gets, the less tolerant I am for screwups, if that’s what you are coming to tell me.”

  Michael put himself in high gear. He dashed back to the club, which was all but empty, save for his two friends and the three Jersey girls, since it didn’t start to rock until after eleven. He told them he had an important meeting but that he’d be back. He then dashed down the fire-escape stairs that were used as the entrance to the club, jumped in his Mercedes parked across the street, and motored off. Since he was so far downtown, he took the Williamsburg Bridge and then the expressway all the way to 108th Street in Corona. In just slightly more than twenty minutes, he had the Neapolitan in sight.

  Michael had calmed down significantly during the short drive. He’d even pondered what plan B might be if Vinnie simply refused to help, as he’d done that morning. Michael couldn’t come up with any likely alternatives, meaning he had to convince Vinnie that he had to help. Such reasoning may have been well and good while Michael had been in the car, but now that he was crossing the street and about to confront Vinnie, his fears came back with a vengeance.

  Just outside the door, he stopped, trying to think up an appropriate intro. Vaguely, he thought he’d try to appeal to Vinnie’s vanity, which was at least a big target. With that thought in mind, Michael went through the door and slipped through the curtain.

  The restaurant was filled with birthday party revelers. The ceiling was clogged with balloons, and streamers were everywhere. The tiny dance floor was littered with confetti, and a large banner hung behind the bar with the words Happy Birthday Victorio. Vinnie was at the same table as he was in the afternoon, with Carol at his side. Michael did not recognize his other friends. Frank Sinatra was still droning away.

  When Michael looked at Vinnie, he did a minor double take. He couldn’t help but be buoyed. Vinnie was laughing so hard his eyes were apparently tearing. Michael stayed rooted where he was in hopes of catching Vinnie’s eye, but after five minutes it was apparent it wasn’t going to happen. With reluctance, Michael started off in Vinnie’s direction. He recognized a few people, but most everybody else was a stranger. Michael couldn’t help but notice that neither Franco nor Angelo seemed to be present, although he did see Freddie and Richie at the bar.

  As he neared the table, he finally caught Vinnie’s eye, and he was pleased that Vinnie’s smile did not falter. Vinnie introduced everyone, and Michael dutifully shook hands around the table. Then Vinnie excused himself, waved for Michael to follow, and walked deeper into the restaurant, waving at some of the guests and shaking hands with others. They then walked quickly through the kitchen, which was in a mild panic to get out the entrées. In the far back of the kitchen was a door to an office. Vinnie went through without hesitation. Paolo Salvato, the owner, looked up from his desk in surprise.

  “Paolo, my friend,” Vinnie intoned. “Would it be an imposition if we used your office for a few moments?”

  Paolo stood up. “Not at all.” He hustled out from behind the desk and disappeared into the kitchen, pulling the office door closed in the process.

  “Okay, Mikey,” Vinnie said, turning to Michael. “What’s this new problem that couldn’t wait until morning?”

  Michael started by saying it was the kind of problem that only Vinnie could deal with. That was the attempt at appeasing Vinnie’s ego. Then Michael hurriedly outlined what Angela had told him, namely that there was a woman doctor—a medical examiner, to be precise—who had suddenly taken it upon herself to solve the problem of the bacteria that had been causing the problems at the Angels hospitals. Michael added that this was a very unfortunate development, in that this doctor could go to the media and the IPO would be dead. He finished by saying that someone uniquely persuasive had to talk with her and convince her it was in her interest to cease and desist.

  To Michael’s relief, Vinnie didn’t respond negatively, nor did his expression change while Michael had run through his quick summary. But when Michael was through, in the most unexpected manner, Vinnie cocked his head to the side and with an impenetrably wry smile asked, “By any chance, is the doctor’s name Laurie Montgomery?”

  “It is,” Michael replied with amazement and not a little confusion.

  “Oh, what a tragedy,” Vinnie said, clapping his hands in delight.

  “Do you know this individual?”

  “Oh, yes,” Vinnie said calmly. “Miss Montgomery and I have a history. She caused me one hell of a blowup with my wife over her brother’s funeral home and also got me indicted and thrown in prison for two years. I’d say that means we know each other. But do you know who has had even more trouble than I have had with this bitch?”

  “I can’t guess,” Michael said. He was astounded and thankful at this unexpected but fortuitous situation.

  “Angelo! Fifteen years ago, she was responsible for his face getting so badly burned he almost died.”

  Vinnie fumbled in the side pocket of his jacket and tried to pull out his cell phone. In his haste, the phone seemed to resist. When he finally got it free, he quickly made a call. Franco answered. Vinnie put the phone on speaker.

  “How are you two guys doing? Enjoying the cruise?”

  “We’re having a ball,” Franco said. “The first part of the evening was a pain in the balls, but the second part has made up for it. The fish have been fed.”

  “Terrific,” Vinnie said. “Is Angelo there?”

  “He’s right here.”

  “Put him on.”

  Angelo’s unique voice came through the phone’s speaker. Since he could barely oppose his lips, his b’s, d’s, m’s, and p’s had a distinctive muted quality.

  “Angelo,” Vinnie said. “What if I were to tell you that Dr. Laurie Montgomery…You remember her, don’t you?”

  Instead of answering, Angelo merely laughed in a decisively mordant fashion.

  “What if I were to tell you she is endangering an important deal of ours and that you and Franco need to talk some sense into her like you boys did yesterday with Mr. Yang.”

  Angelo laughed again, but this time with obvious glee. “I’d tell you that you wouldn’t even have to pay me. I’d do it for free, provided I could do it my way.”

  “Guess what? Frankie boy just sang that song a few minutes ago here at the Neapolitan. It appears that you’re going to get your wish.”

  Vinnie disconnected. He put his arm around Michael’s shoulder and guided him back through the kitchen. “Seems that this is your lucky day, too. The eight-K problem has been put to bed, and you can stop worrying about Laurie Montgomery. Not bad for a night’s work.”

  Michael merely nodded that he’d heard. He was speechless. Twenty minutes later, after having a glass of wine at Vinnie’s table, he sat in his car, still marveling at the unpredictability of life.

  14

  APRIL 3, 2007

  9:45 P.M.

  Adam Williamson was nestled into his Range Rover like a hand in a perfect-fitting, cashmere-lined leather glove. Ludwig van Beethoven’s remarkable Ninth Symphony had been playing for the last hundred or so miles, and the astonishing final choir was about to begin. Adam had the volume almost full blast so the sound was as if he were seated in the center of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. As the choir suddenly commenced, Adam sang along in German, his voice drowning out the professional singers. It was so moving that Adam could feel goose pimples spread over his back and down his extremities. It was nearly orgasmic.

  With almost precise timing the last few notes of the symphony died away as Adam completed a wide three-hundred-sixty-degree right-hand turn that culminated in a row of toll booths blocking the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel leading from New Jersey to New York. After paying the toll he entered the tunnel.

  A Bach CD was the next selection, and the sounds of the fragile strings and ha
rpsichord were the perfect foil for the brooding drama of Beethoven, and Adam’s fingers began to play lightly on the steering wheel in time to the music.

  It had been a pleasant drive from Washington, D.C., up to New York City, but Adam was now eager to arrive and eager to carry out his mission. He knew very little about his target, and that was the way he preferred it, a fact that his handlers appreciated. In his current line of work, too much knowledge served only to complicate the issue. All he needed was a name, an address of either work or home, and a few photos. If no photo was available, then a description would suffice. On those missions where there was no photo and only a description, he always allowed himself more time. Adam was not the kind of person who brooked mistakes, so the setup invariably took longer. And this current mission happened to be one of the no-photo types, so he had reserved three full days on the outside chance he might have difficulty with the ID.

  The Range Rover emerged from the tunnel into the very heart of midtown Manhattan. Adam had not been back to New York since he’d come home from Iraq. As he headed north up Eighth Avenue, he observed the city dispassionately, which was hardly strange, since in his current persona he viewed everything dispassionately. When he was young, even while in college, he’d come to the big city on numerous occasions with great excitement, at first with his family and then alone, and even on occasion with his fiancée, but now as he drove north along Eighth Avenue with its tawdry shops, it seemed as though it had been in a previous life, and in some respects, it had been. Adam had been a totally different person back then. In fact, he labeled his life as BI and AI, meaning before Iraq and after Iraq.

  BI Adam Williamson had been a rather reserved, gentlemanly, quietly intelligent young man with clean-cut good looks who’d fit into his upper-class New England life in an exemplary fashion. He’d gone to a respected boarding school, had learned and respected good manners, and had gone to Harvard, as did his father and his grandfather and back ad infinitum, back to when the Mayflower’s long boat had scraped ashore in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

  The beginning of the interim between BI and AI hadn’t been a nativity but rather the horrific event of 9/11, which had jolted Adam’s comfortable and predictable world, akin to one of the planets being knocked out of its orbit. At the instant the first plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, Adam had been brushing his teeth in the Harvard Business School dorm, where he was dutifully learning the ins and outs of business as preparation ultimately to assume control of the family owned financial company.

  Against his parents’ wishes as well as his law-student fiancée’s, Adam insisted on volunteering for the military in a sudden burst of messianic zeal to do his part for America and democracy. As a natural athlete who’d been an all-American lacrosse player as well as a polo devotee, combined with a personality that motivated him to approach everything he did with one hundred percent effort, once in the military, which he’d previously known nothing about, he became fixated on becoming a member of the Special Forces. And in keeping with his personality, even that wasn’t enough, and he wasn’t satisfied until he became a member of the Delta Force.

  Adam had enjoyed the training and reveled in its difficulty, as if the training in and of itself was helping the cause of democracy. But the real thing, meaning actual combat, came as an utter shock, because Adam was far more cerebral than physical. On his second night mission in Iraq, he was forced to kill with a knife another living, breathing human being, and his reaction shocked and shamed him. The experience had triggered a transcendental guilt and sadness, which he hid from his squadmates. To overcome what he construed as a weakness and a failing, he went out of his way on subsequent missions to kill. Over time and with equal horror and relief, he came to accept what he was doing as well as accept that he’d been metamorphosed into a true killing machine with little or no emotional response. It wasn’t something he was happy about or proud of. It was just what he thought was expected of him.

  Adam turned right at Columbus Circle, and the Bach Brandenburg Concertos seemed so apropos with the sudden appearance of Central Park, with its lacy, budding trees providing a welcome relief from the hard, angular, and mostly concrete city. Adam’s route was to take him along Central Park South all the way to Madison Avenue where he’d turn north. At that point, it was a matter of going around the block to arrive at his destination, the Hotel Pierre, a New York City landmark from the Gilded Age.

  The Pierre had been the hotel Adam had stayed in ever since he’d visited the city as a small child, all the way up to and including when he was in business school. On this trip, he’d insisted on staying there, to his handler’s chagrin. His primary handler, in particular, had tried to get him to stay in some less vigilant surroundings and where he’d have his Range Rover instantly at his disposal. But Adam had insisted. He was curious if he’d feel any nostalgia. He didn’t think he would. It was as if his experiences in Iraq, particularly the covert missions, has sucked all the emotion out of him from both witnessing and participating in the kind of atrocities that before Iraq, BI, he couldn’t have ever imagined. And most disturbing of all, he’d come to enjoy what he was doing, even the killing.

  His Iraq experience came to a disastrous conclusion. It happened during an ill-fated covert action that went horribly wrong. He and the rest of his team had ended up being decimated by misdirected friendly fire, which he and his colleagues had called in. Although he’d not been killed, as were his squadmates, Adam had had a leg broken and had been rendered unconscious. In such a vulnerable state, he’d been taken hostage by the very people he and his team had been sent to kill or capture.

  Despite supposed preparatory training as a POW, Adam was unprepared for his ordeal as a captive. He leg was never appropriately attended to and was a source of constant pain. But worse, he was tortured by repeated episodes during which he was certain he was about to be shot or beheaded.

  Although it had been explained to him as a common psychological response called the Stockholm syndrome, he was shocked when it happened to him. After several months, he began to identify with his captors and their twisted ideology. He’d even made a tape that was shown on Al Jazeera satellite TV in which he lauded the insurgents’ cause and cast aspersions on the United States’ motives for the Iraq intervention. His mind had been so twisted that when his release was eventually brokered by an FBI negotiator for the secret exchange of a number of insurgent detainees, he didn’t know whether to rejoice or bewail his release and ultimate repatriation. Intuitively, he’d known he could never return to his former life; it was simply out of the question.

  Adam turned left on 61st Street, and halfway down the block pulled over to the Pierre’s entrance marquee. The doorman tipped his hat and opened the Range Rover’s door. “Checking in, sir?”

  Adam merely nodded as he climbed out of the car. Following the doorman to the car’s rear, Adam insisted on taking the tennis bag, which contained the tools of his trade, the moment the doorman opened the hatchback. The small overnight bag he allowed to be carried for him.

  “Will you be needing your vehicle this evening?” the doorman asked as he held open the hotel’s door.

  Adam nodded again.

  “Fine, I’ll keep it right here at the door,” the doorman said as he gestured toward the registration desk.

  Directions weren’t necessary for Adam, as the lobby had barely changed over the twenty or so years he had intermittently stayed at the hotel. Pausing at the flower-bedecked center table in the middle of the carpet, Adam let his eyes take in the familiar surroundings, including the raised sitting area to the right and mostly nineteenth-century English furniture. As he’d expected, he didn’t feel anything. The scene evoked no emotion whatsoever. It was like his memories were of someone else’s life.

  The check-in was dispatched with commendable speed, after which the receptionist called for a porter, saying, “Hector, this is Mr. Bramford from Connecticut. Would you show him to his room? By the way, Mr. Bramfor
d, we’ve given you a very nice park view.”

  Bramford was one of the several identities Adam carried on this particular mission, along with all the associated documentation. His handlers in Washington ran a discreet risk-management/security firm with branches in major cities around the world, and Adam worked for them for special operations as an independent contractor. The clients for the current mission, all former lawyers and politicians, had contacts in the highest levels of government, so obtaining the identities had been relatively simple.

  “This way, Mr. Bramford,” Hector said, pointing toward the elevators.

  The interior of the elevator was unique in regard to its French style, and Adam remembered it the moment he stepped in. Its frivolousness as well as its cleanliness stood in such sharp juxtaposition to his war experience that he marveled it could exist on the same planet as Iraq. And as he rose up in the fussy décor, the sheer contrast of the total situation made him think back to his release from captivity. At that time, he’d been picked up in the scrubby, battle-scarred desert dressed only in a soiled pair of boxer shorts and limping on a deformed leg.

  Within hours, he’d been airlifted to Germany where his leg was rebroken and reset, and he began treatment for what was called a post-traumatic stress disorder variant. Under the psychiatrist’s guidance, Adam made considerable strides in dealing with his anxiety, his inability to concentrate, his joylessness, and his difficulty sleeping. He had had less success with generating any interest whatsoever in returning to any semblance of his former life, which included resurrecting his relationships with his family, his family’s business, his fiancée, or Harvard Business School. He also had had no success in adjusting to the loss of the camaraderie of his Delta Force colleagues and the unique and addictive risk of making a kill.

  Adam’s psychiatrist had become frustrated by what she considered Adam’s lack of progress, until she suggested a new strategy: namely, for Adam to embrace what he’d been morphed into from his military experience rather than attempting to suppress or ignore it. It was even she, as an Alexandria, Virginia, resident, who had introduced Adam to the founder and CEO of Risk Control and Security Solutions, which was extremely receptive to the combination of his Special Forces training and his experience of having been a POW. To protect his identity, they worked out an employment relationship, which didn’t show up on their books. In return, they paid him extremely well.