Lethal Reaction

by S A Gardner

  Please don’t push him over the edge!

  I knew Sir Ashton heard my silent plea. He disregarded it. “You were Damian’s right arm, as sharp as the sharpest can get. So explain to me why you started all this. When Anna first fell sick, why didn’t you go to Damian, to Calista—to me with the problem? You think we wouldn’t have moved heaven and earth to help her? And now, after the deed has been done, and you’re in your current situation, how is it that you don’t realize how vulnerable your three fragile loved ones make you now? How can’t you understand that your best bet is to make amends, to have your former leader and colleagues, and me, on your side again?”

  Ed raised both hands, pressed them, Colt and all, to his skull as if to push against the pressure about to burst it.

  “Stop—just stop…”

  Sir Ashton didn’t stop. “Don’t you realize what Calista and her team have done the last four days? They’ve eliminated three of your puppeteers. Even if you go to your new mass-murdering bosses with all of us in a gift basket, do you think they’d forgive you for costing them three of their allies so far? For knowing about them at all, once you’ve expended your use?”

  Ed dropped the gun, dropped to his knees, gasping for breath. “Stop—just—just go, get out. Both of you.”

  Sir Ashton only closed the distance between them, placed his hand on Ed’s shuddering shoulder. “Come with us.”

  What was this man doing? His legendary psychic whip had brought Ed down from his frenzy, and got him down on his knees, literally. It had bought his freedom. We should be getting the hell out of here, before Ed’s breakdown took a sudden turn for the lethal again.

  I tensed, every muscle primed as Ed moved, staggered up to his feet, ready to take him down if he lashed out.

  Ed only looked at the hand gripping his shoulder, swiped both of his across the moisture drenching his face and shook his head. “I said you can go. This is over. I’m leaving Anna and my babies with you—for now. And you have nothing to fear from me. But I draw the line at putting myself back in Damian’s range.”

  Our eyes met. And I saw it. He wasn’t protecting himself against Damian’s wrath. He just couldn’t face him again. He knew no matter where he was, Damian would get to him if he wanted, that when I walked out of here, I’d remain all that would stand between them. He had no fear for himself. The only reason he wanted to live was for Anna and his daughters. And if his death meant better lives for them, he’d go in a second.

  I walked up to them in slow, careful steps. I still wasn’t risking setting Ed off again. I gripped Sir Ashton’s other hand, tugged. “Let’s go.”

  Sir Ashton sighed in resignation. “Just once, I wish any of you would prove me wrong.” He took one last look at Ed. “My door is open. You don’t need to break it down next time.”

  Then he shook off my support and headed for the door.

  At the threshold, I looked back at Ed. He looked—hollow, almost insubstantial. As if he was fading away with anguish and guilt and defeat. Strange thing, pity. It obeyed no logic. It clogged my heart, trashed my resolutions.

  But I had to make a statement for the record. “Don’t make me sorry—sorrier, for letting you live.”

  As I closed the door Ed’s call boomed. “Cali!”

  I wasn’t answering. I was dragging Sir Ashton and running out of here. Sir Ashton evaded my lunge, raised one knowing eyebrow. He knew what I’d do.

  I did it. I turned on my heel and reentered.

  “Tell—tell Damian…” Ed stopped, as if truly choking, before he forced the panting words out. “Tell him I didn’t think he could help her—didn’t think at all. I-I went mad seeing her suffer. I’d take it back—I’d do anything to take it back. Just—just let me know what you want me to do. And I expect nothing in return. Nothing for me. I know now you’ll take care of my girls…”

  My heart convulsed as he broke down again.

  Just end this.

  “We will, Ed ,” I rasped. “And even after all you’d cost us, I’d rather see you live, for them. Sir Ashton’s offer stands for both of us. Don’t disappoint us again.”

  Then I ran out. I wasn’t stopping for anything this time.

  Twenty-Six

  “Stop fussing, Calista.”

  I shoved the stainless steel basin in Sir Ashton’s hand higher to better catch the saline I was irrigating his wound with. “You stop moving. And I’m not fussing. You need stitches.”

  “I don’t. It’s a simple gash.”

  I took the basin away, examined the serrated edge of the wound that ran from his hairline, passed by the outer rim of his orbit then snaked down to his ear lobe. This looked like the outcome of having his face smashed into a wall, with his own bones tearing the flesh from the inside out.

  Maybe I’d go back and stomp on Ed some more after all.

  I gritted my teeth against the upsurge of violence. “Simple gashes need stitching.”

  “This one requires sterilizing and tissue glue at most.”

  “You’re just afraid of the local’s injection.” He opened his mouth and I closed it, manually, with a hand on the top of his wealth of iron-grey hair and another below his aristocratic jaw. His freakishly perfect teeth met on a click. His ocean-blue eyes were eloquent enough. Yeah, yeah. I was incorrigible. “I’m the doctor here, so suck it up and let me get to work.”

  I released his head, located three nerve plexuses, infiltrated each with a third of the mixture of lidocaine and epinephrine. He didn’t even wince or stiffen.

  Impressive. Local anesthesia stung like hell, even when buffered with saline like I had it.

  I waited for it to take effect and he harrumphed. “Annoying. Just like your habit of forgetting that I am a doctor, too.”

  “You are?” I scoffed. “And you stopped practicing—when? Yeah. Around the fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “That sort of time-oblivious hyperbole should be reserved to awareness-bankrupt teens with no life mileage. You, my dear, are not a spring chick anymore.”

  I hooted with laughter. Man, I loved the way he talked. All cultured and complex and cut-throat. I relished the way he didn’t let me get away with anything. Not that it ever stopped me from trying. All the time. He made me feel nineteen again, in the good sense, too.

  I stuck my tongue out at him. “Why, Sir Ashton! Shoving a lady’s age in her face? I’m shocked.”

  “I thought calling you a lady was a bone-fracturing offense in your book, Calista.”

  My smile almost split my face. “That’s your oblique way of telling me I’m no lady?” His look was all draw-your-own-conclusions. I snickered. “Bottom line, you stopped practicing. I eat and breathe medicine. My mileage here definitely surpasses yours.”

  “Why are you still pressing your point? You’ve already pressed that of your syringe into my supratrochlear, infraorbital and mandibular nerve plexuses.”

  “So you remember your applied anatomy! Say—with these nerve blocks I can give you a ‘two-stitch’ facelift while I’m at it.”

  “That’s your oblique way of telling me I need maintenance?”

  “Oblique? You talking to me? The only oblique I do is a sliding homerun with both feet into my mouth.”

  He gave a sage nod. “Too true. Thanks for the offer, though, as snide as it was. I’d rather age gracefully.”

  “And how.” I had a ridiculous urge to pinch his cheek. I gave in to it, to his haughty surprise. Nice and firm, too. You’d never guess he was over sixty. “Your distinguished-ness is on an age-related geometric progression. And you know it.”

  He huffed his complete unconcern with such trivialities. “Distinguished-ness isn’t even a word.”

  Smiling full at him then, I got down to work, debriding his wound. Afterwards, I used absorbable monofilament on a cutting needle, placed interrupted sutures in an intracuticular technique for best esthetic result. I layered closure through subcutaneous tissues from the deepest parts of the wound up until I reached the dermal level. Thou
gh he could afford the best scar revision esthetic surgery could offer, I’d made sure he wouldn’t need any.

  I finished up by injecting him, in spite of his vehement protest, with an antibiotic cover and a tetanus booster. I didn’t care how updated his multi-million health insurance kept him on his shots. I was taking every precaution after the years-old grime and mold he’d had his face smeared in today.

  After I put all my stuff away, I turned to him. “So—tell me.”

  He understood what I meant. The agent’s fate.

  “I wondered when you’d ask.” He stood up, started pacing my room. I’d used it since Emergency was a post-Hurricane Ed zone right now. “I personally conducted the experiments to find out what destroys the agent in a South Korean research facility I sponsor. I didn’t let anyone in on the nature of the agent or my experiments, kept it locked away as I experimented on samples. It turned out it was indestructible by any method—nothing touched it. Jake was a one-of-a-kind genius, and he told the truth, in this at least.”

  And here came the scheduled detonation of grief and regret. How many more could I take, I wondered.

  Sir Ashton gave me the moment he knew I needed. We’d both had hands in Jake’s madness and eventual destruction.

  He finally exhaled. “You did the only thing you could have, Calista. The agent would have survived the explosion, would have propagated to infect millions. The only way to deactivate it turned out to be its own pre-designed mechanism of dissociation on exposure to the atmosphere for two weeks. I supervised the process myself and got rid of the inert remainder for extra safety as nuclear waste. As of last week, the agent no longer exists.”

  I closed my eyes.

  It was gone. It was over. He’d done it.

  Those damned tears rose again, the cresting wave of every brutal emotion there was. Relief, reprieve and a breaking dam of self-blame and anxiety. For everything.

  But mainly for him. “I’m so sorry for dragging you into this in the first place.”

  “Don’t be silly, Calista. Who else could you have turned to? Who else had the means and the power to handle such a threat? As for the current crisis, I am as involved as you are. More. I always have been. These men you’re hunting are the very reasons why I created TOP in the first place.”

  His words almost passed through me unregistered.

  Then they did and something came unhinged inside my head.

  I felt it clanging in there when I erupted to my feet, jangling with stupefaction. “You—created TOP?”

  He nodded as if he hadn’t thrown a grenade into the very foundations of my belief system. “I did, to fight the corruption of the power-mad who create indiscriminate misery and chaos.”

  I collapsed back into my chair. “You? You’re the power behind TOP? This has to mean PACT, too! You, the ultimate advocate for fixing the laws not breaking them? The world’s leading promoter of peaceful solutions?”

  He came to sit in the nearest chair beside me. “I did dub it The Order for Peace, and that’s what I’d intended it to be. You know I founded GCA thirty years ago, but ten years later, while I still believed in the humanitarian approach, I realized there had to be an adjunctive therapy to the symptomatic treatments GCA was offering humanity, one that treats the source of its ills and infections. So I laid TOP’s foundation, brought core members together through untraceable funding and networking and created its bible of striking down the corrupt financial empires and stripping them of the legitimate trappings that made them untouchable. I never meant to play more than an indirect steering role in TOP’s operations, and for years, it achieved great successes and played pivotal roles.

  “Then they created PACT. And though it went against my convictions to combine my methods with physical liquidations and maximum force, I still couldn’t object when they were going after known evil forces who only seemed to get stronger, no matter what legitimate measures were taken against them. I kept my reservations to myself since I never exposed my link to them, and more so when governments welcomed their intervention and praised their results, even came to depend on them.”

  He stood up, ran a pondering hand through his immaculate-again mane. “I had to admit that the world has become a different place and that I no longer had the answers, that maybe their evolution to fit the world was a natural progression. I believed it even more when I realized that my own GCA needed the Combat Doctors Project, and when I needed PACT to train my new generation of humanitarian operatives. When I needed Damian to train you, create you, the doctor warrior I believed, and believe more everyday, that the world needs.”

  Any other time, I would have jumped on his validation with wagging tail and lapping tongue. Right now, I was numb to my marrow.

  “But now that those men you’re hunting have managed to corrupt TOP’s great power for good, I’m letting go of my last qualms and my belief that there is a better way. There is none where they are concerned. They are reason enough for me to risk all, starting with my convictions, to destroy them.”

  It was only then I saw it. That thing that slithered deep and ominous in his eyes.

  God! Who could have imagined. He had a monster inside, too. Probably far more destructive when unleashed for being so thoroughly and chronically suppressed.

  “I will no longer stay on the sidelines watching you in the thick of the fight, Calista. I will be with you in the final battle. I have added myself to Desideria’s billionaire guest list. My presence alone will make sure our targets will never suspect they are being singled out.”

  The import of his words crashed through my paralysis.

  I erupted up again. I was staying erect this time. “You’re not going anywhere near where I’ll worry about you getting in the line of fire.”

  He somehow got me back in my seat. “Contrary to what you think, I’m not a helpless old man. The only way Ed got me was through imitating Damian’s voice and telling me you were in danger. He demanded to come up to talk plans of your retrieval, to send my guards away so no one would see him. I tried to call you and you didn’t answer and I got so worried I let him come up without even thinking of confirming with the rest of your team.”

  So I was his Achilles heel, too. The worst thing I could be. The one thing I never wanted to be. Couldn’t afford to be.

  How had I ended up being so many invincible men’s only weakness?

  “But I held my own,” he went on. “You did notice Ed’s injured mouth, didn’t you? Just that I did that to Damian’s former second-in-command attests that I’m not the pushover you fear I am. Even if you won’t rely on me in physical combat, I’ll be invaluable in setting up the stage and dealing with unwanted developments.”

  I wanted to hurl a categorical refusal at him. What came out was something that hasn’t passed by my brain on its way to my lips. “How will you explain the condition of your face to your fellow billionaires?”

  “Let me worry about my peers, Calista. And then I am sure you’re as handy with the concealing make-up as you are with the healing touch.” I opened my mouth and he closed it for me the same way I’d done his. “This isn’t a discussion. You need me there, and that’s where I’ll be.”

  Twenty-Seven

  I’ll be damned.

  If I wasn’t already, that is. Which I probably was.

  Who was I kidding? I had to be damned. It had to be a curse. That would explain it all.

  Either that, or I’d been dropped off the cosmic manufacturing line before the insight-installing stage.

  I mean, him? My Sir Ashton? TOP’s founder?

  As if this bomb wasn’t enough, he’d muscled his way into our showdown. Not only had I dropped a few more years today extracting him from Ed, I’d probably drop the rest tomorrow night worrying about him being in the line of fire.

  And he dared comment on my age. I was surprised I didn’t look like his granny by now!

  I stood there in the moonless night, watching him receding from the Sanctuary’s entrance, entering his cha
uffeured limo as if hell’s bats were on his tail. I’d changed my mind about his involvement in our plans for the tenth time in an hour, and had been about to sedate him and keep him locked up in the Sanctuary until tomorrow night passed.

  But the hell of it was, the plan we’d worked, that incorporated his presence, was more solid than the original one. As we’d talked specifics we’d had a mini-conference with Desideria and she’d jumped in and planted herself right in the thick of things, offered more details and tightened all loose ends. I had to admit, their roles made the plan more workable.

  Now all I had to do was deal with enough anxiety for both of them to send me to an asylum for the terminally agitated.

  I trudged back inside. The fluorescent lights buzzing frequency hit me with vertigo as I entered from the night’s steady darkness. And as if by magic, Damian materialized beside me before I reached for the nearest wall’s support.

  His fingers brushed clammy bangs out of my heated eyes, brushed my lips. “Easy, amor.”

  I bit his fingers, got a sharp indrawn breath of surprise. Of pleasure, too. Damn him. “You knew all along, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t pretend bafflement this time. “About Sir Ashton and his TOP associations? Ciertamente.”

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t decerebrate you.”

  “You love the way my brain moves my body?” I pinched him. At least I tried. Impossible to do with nonexistent flab. “It was up to him to tell you. And then, he has nothing to do with the corruptions, and has been trying to deal with them.”

  “And he could be a prime target for just that, for his very connection with the old TOP! Haven’t you thought of that?”

  “Sir Ashton is a knight in shining armor, sure, but that doesn’t make him vulnerable. He’s shrewd and longterm and all-bases-covering and he surrounds himself with only people he can trust with his life. Me and you being cases in point. And he’s so big, so influential, no one wants to lose his connections, his intervention or his business, not even the world’s biggest scum. The only reason they would have risked losing that would have been for the agent, which they never and would never find out he had. And now it’s gone.”