If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  Hugo came back into the room, clucking like a mother hen to let Lally know that he thought she’d talked for long enough.

  “I have to go now,” Lally said. “My nurse wants me to take a nap.”

  “You should,” Chris said quickly. “You need all the rest you can get.”

  “Thank you again for the painting, so much. It’ll be a lovely reminder to me to do as I’m told so that I can get back to teaching as fast as I can.”

  “Katy’ll be glad of that,” Chris said.

  Lally put down the phone and looked back at the painting. She hadn’t liked to suggest that he come to visit her, and Chris had clearly felt awkward about butting in where he might not be wanted, but the portrait stopped her from feeling deflated. She saw the fineness of the brush strokes and saw, too, that if it was true that the beauty of a subject was in the eye of the beholder, then this particular artist definitely thought she was beautiful. Right now, wise or not, that notion made Lally very glad.

  Hugo waited till later that evening, after he had served Lally a bowl of goulash soup with fresh baked bread, to bring up the subject again of the Webber family and Lally’s involvement with them.

  “May I be honest?” He sat down in one of the armchairs.

  “You always have been.”

  The sitting room felt like a haven. Hugo had switched off the overhead light and turned on the two lovely red and yellow glass lamps that Toni Petrillo had had commissioned for Lally by one of their local craftsmen two birthdays ago, and the only other illumination came from the fireplace and the world beyond the windows. Lally had asked Hugo not to draw the drapes, because it was snowing again, and she loved sitting snug inside watching the flakes tumble past the street lamps outside.

  “You’ve fallen for him, haven’t you?”

  Lally remained silent.

  “You don’t have to answer. I know you have. And it’s just as clear to me now that Webber feels the same way about you – and so he should, but – ”

  “Don’t go on,” Lally said, softly. “There’s no need – I know everything you might want to say to me. Chris is a married man with a sick wife and a load of problems, and Katy’s a pupil of mine, and it’s a lousy situation to rush headlong into.”

  “But sometimes,” Hugo said, “emotions take over from common sense, don’t they?”

  “They sure do.” Lally looked up at Chris’s painting propped on the mantelpiece. It was like having him in the room with her. She thought maybe she ought to find that a disturbing notion, but she didn’t.

  “And right now,” Hugo went on, “you’re extra vulnerable. Maybe too much so to be capable of making sensible decisions. You’re usually a pretty sensible woman, Lally.”

  She smiled at him. “Right now, Hugo, I have to admit that being sensible is not my first priority.” She wriggled her toes comfortably under her blanket. “Tonight, at any rate, I’m too busy being glad to be alive and home again, and with you.”

  “I reckon the only person in the world almost as glad as you is me.”

  “I know,” she said, gently.

  “Will you at least try to be a little careful?”

  “I might not want to be exactly sensible,” Lally said, slowly, “but for the time being, I don’t feel like taking too many risks either. Not with my life, not even with Chris Webber.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Wednesday, January 13th

  Sam McKinley had been back on the job for a week, but today was his first day on active duty. The medical officer had read and approved all his hospital reports, and, having checked him over personally, had agreed that Sam was good as new.

  The San Francisco Fire Department looked after its own, and Sam had wanted for nothing during his brief illness, an illness that had scared the hell out of him for a few days, but which had proven, after all, to be nothing that couldn’t be put right with a simple operation and some tender loving aftercare.

  The other thing that had worried Sam almost as much as his initial fear of premature death, had been the possibility that they might not let him come back to work. Sam McKinley was not capable of doing a desk job; he had juices running through him that responded to action, to excitement, to the unique comradeship of his particular line of work and, when all the chips were down, to danger. If Sam had to die young, he always told his brother Andy – not his wife, of course, no one ever, ever talked to Susan about death – it sure as shit wasn’t going to be in bed.

  Not that Sam had any kind of death wish. If he’d ever, for a second, believed he might have had, all those thoughts had been wiped clean away the day his trouble started. Those juices that he knew made him function had all but stopped then, and when Sam had stared at himself in the mirror, he’d seen a face that had seemed, structurally at least, to have been his own, and yet it had not been him, for the essence had gone from the friendly old brown eyes that had winked back at him every morning of his life when he shaved and got ready to go to work.

  Still, all the worry was behind him now, and he was back in the Department amongst his colleagues, and waiting for the first call of the shift. J.D. had said to him a half-hour ago that he hoped, for Sam’s sake, that their first morning would bring nothing more serious than stranded cats and elevators, but Sam had a notion that something else was coming.

  It came all right.

  It was at a warehouse not too far from Fisherman’s Wharf, and no one seemed to know how or why it had erupted the way it had, suddenly, out of nowhere, but there were two blocked exits and there were men trapped inside with Christ knew what kind of noxious fumes, and time running out.

  Sam fought it with the others from the outside for more than an hour, and the heat was indescribable, the way it always was – once in a while, Susan asked him how it felt, but he always shrugged it off because he knew she couldn’t take knowing – but then he heard that J.D. had gone inside and that he was in trouble, and that was the old red rag to the bull within Sam McKinley, because J.D. had saved his life three years back in a big blaze on Fulton Street, and they’d been best buddies way before that, and if J.D. was in trouble, Sam was going to get him out.

  He saw him right away, saw that he was okay except for a big wooden crate on his leg, pinning him down, and it was hard for them to talk, with the respirator masks over their faces, and impossible to hear, what with the roar of the fire and the hoses, and anyway, there was no need for words, for the relief in J.D.’s eyes when he saw Sam coming for him was more than enough, and Sam had too much work to do to bother with talk.

  He got the crate off J.D.’s leg, and he snapped off a long stick of wood for a cane, and they started out together, Sam keeping J.D. ahead of him so that he could be sure he got out okay – and that was when it hit him, like ten sledgehammers, like all the fireworks on all the Fourth of Julys rolled into one.

  And all the juices that were Sam McKinley rocked and rolled for a split second, and then were quiet and laid to rest. And J.D. was outside before he realized that Sam wasn’t with him, and there was no one else left inside the warehouse to see the spurt of blood.

  And anyway, there was too much smoke.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thursday, January 14th

  The man still made time to come back to the room for a while every night. It felt good to be there, as it always did. Better than home, better than work, better than anywhere. And they needed him to come, his little dragons, to change their water and clean their enclosures and make sure they were feeding properly.

  He liked watching them eat. The geckos ate live insects – crickets, wax moths, locusts, anything the little creatures could easily overpower. The two green iguanas, with their big spines and dewlaps, could stay healthy on a diet of chopped cabbage or dog food, but once in a while the man brought them mice or birds’ eggs. And then there were his favourites, his Gila monsters, almost pretty with their black and pink bands, and smaller and gentler than the iguanas, but the most respected, the most feared, for the grooved teeth th
at conducted the venom from the glands in their lower jaws.

  “They have very poor eyesight,” the reptile house keeper at the Chicago Zoo had told him. “And they’re real slow moving, they can’t go for the big, fast animals, so they go for baby rats and fledglings, voles, eggs – anything small enough to swallow whole. They’re nocturnal, too, and real shy, so we don’t know as much about them as we’d like to, but we think their venom is mostly a defensive mechanism, because unlike snakes, they kill their prey almost instantly by crushing with their jaws.”

  “So the venom’s a secondary thing?” the man asked.

  “It’s the trauma of the bite that kills, the venom follows involuntarily. These creatures have tremendous jowls and muscle – if they bite you, it’s real hard to get them off because they hang on, and those grooved teeth are very sharp.”

  The man had stared at the single stocky lizard in its glass enclosure.

  “Could they kill a man?” he had asked.

  “They’ve killed a few, so I’m told, but usually a bite is just damned painful and makes you real sick for a while.”

  The man was meticulously careful with his Gila monsters. But then, he was always careful about everything. And patient, too. He’d endured decades of patience. And now it was over. It had begun.

  The finished design for his revenge, complete with scale drawings, mathematical calculations and blueprint for operation, had taken him less than forty-eight hours to conceive. He had taken one summer weekend, had shut himself up in the room with everything he needed for inspiration; had stocked up from Kuhn’s Delicatessen, bought champagne from House of Glunz, slotted in his new compact disc version of Siegfried, and settled down, opposite the vivaria, to begin.

  There had been countless possibilities, many diverse ways of achieving his aim. He understood perfectly every single component that went into a pacemaker, every millimetre of circuitry; he could read and comprehend it all in the way ordinary people read newspapers or comic strips or stared at their TVs. And that summer weekend, for once allowing his brain full, brilliant, free rein, he had sifted through the endless permutations, suggesting and dismissing, seeking perfection, purity and flawlessness.

  And he had found it.

  It was laughably simple, when you came right down to it.

  The second stage, the active planning, had proved almost as rapid. He had begun in late August to assemble what he would need, and by mid-September everything had been in place on his workbench in the room. Everything except the plastique. He didn’t want that stuff anywhere near him until he was ready to begin.

  Hagen Pacing was, at that time, producing eight hundred pacemakers each month, at a rate of two hundred per week. Manufacture was, as always, divided into batches of one hundred, each batch in turn divided down into a further three divisions of thirty-three pacemakers, with one master copy set aside for security. The first hundred were manufactured between Monday morning and Wednesday noon, the second between then and Friday evening.

  He had considered plans of far greater complexity, had been tempted almost beyond endurance by the prospect of producing whole generator boxes, was confident of his ability to make perfect replicas of the genuine articles. But he knew, nonetheless, that simplicity was best, and so he had controlled his impulses.

  On Tuesday and Thursday nights each week, a number of partially assembled boxes were left on the production line, their batteries soldered onto their circuits one stage before being slipped into their titanium cases and welded shut. His plan was to remove a given number of the partly-assembled devices and bring them to his room, where he would detach the batteries and replace them with his own, specially created for his purposes. No one would ever challenge him, for his presence during the evenings and sometimes late at night was taken for granted by the security guards.

  He had to admit that his own tiny batteries were ingenious, real beauties. Several times during the planning and execution, he had experienced a wave of irrational desire to show Ashcroft what he was doing. Best brain at Hagen Pacing, and she knew it, how she knew it, in spite of her refined, quiet manner. He’d have liked to have seen her face, to see the naked admiration in her eyes. But Mother’s voice still sounded a warning rebuke in his head. Self-control above everything.

  The lithium batteries used in all the Hagen pacemakers were manufactured by an independent supplier. They were tiny and powerful – they had to be since they were expected to provide life for the pulse generators for ten to twelve years. His plan was to duplicate the stainless-steel casing of these batteries and to insert four components into each of these hollow cases. A smaller battery, identical in chemistry to the original. A piece of micro-circuitry. Half an ounce of plastique explosive. And a detonator.

  Being smaller, his active battery would not operate the pacemaker for anywhere near as long as the larger battery would, but under the circumstances that hardly mattered. A major consideration during planning had been that though under normal circumstances most pacemakers would be implanted well within one year of production, all Hagen devices were released from the factory with a use-by date of two years from their date of manufacture. He had elected, therefore, to incorporate within his battery a timing circuit to ensure that the countdown to detonation would only begin after implantation.

  There, he had encountered some problems. Hagen Pacing ran rigorous checking and testing procedures, including post-assembly tests designed to mimic the effects of implantation in the human body, to ensure that each pacemaker would work effectively when needed. His circuitry, therefore, would have to distinguish those tests from the real thing, and so he had incorporated a simple counter to register the current being drained from the battery at all times. While a pacemaker was in storage, the drain was tiny. Once implanted, it went up in a great leap. The change from quiescent to operational was easy enough to detect, but the same leap would, of course, occur during the checks after final welding. Those checks took fifteen minutes, and so his circuitry had not only to detect that the battery was running in its pacing mode, but also to count a given number of pulses in that working mode.

  All patients receiving a pacemaker implant remained in hospital for at least twenty-four hours, and a week to ten days after the procedure they returned for a check-up and further testing of their device. It was vital, therefore, that detonation did not take place until after the final discharge of the patient. Once again, the solution had been devastatingly simple. Set to count at a rate of sixty pulses per minute, all that the circuitry within his battery needed to do was to count to one million pulses in the pacing mode, and then, automatically, to arm its own secondary timing circuit and to count down from there to the point of detonation.

  Only one more problem had remained. Once it began – once people had begun to die – it was just a matter of time until they started X-raying patients to check out their pacemakers. On regular hospital X-rays, the steel-cased battery in a pacemaker showed up a small, opaque mass, but when they increased the kilo voltage for a higher penetration beam – and they would, once they knew what they were looking for – they would be able to see his added circuitry – not the plastique explosive, of course, but they would see his timing device, and that would just make it too easy for them. They could set up mass screenings and for all but the few, the very select few, the panic would be over. It wasn’t that he planned to get away with it in the long-term – that wasn’t the point of this at all, not for him. It was his game. It was their pain, their nightmare, their punishment. And he planned to draw it out for as long as possible. He’d waited too long for anything less.

  Screwing up the X-rays for them turned out to be simple too. Easy as falling off a log. He’d make three times as many, that was all. Two-thirds with added circuitry only, one-third with circuitry and plastique. Just to throw them off, to increase the confusion, the fear, the hysteria.

  From the last week of September until the penultimate week of November, he had removed six partially assembled pacemake
rs every Tuesday and Thursday evening, replacing them in the early hours of the next morning with his own batteries soldered to the Hagen circuitry, two of them the real thing, the other four dummies. He was perfectly confident that all his Midnight Specials, as he called them, would pass every inspection. The cases were impeccable in every way, right down to their serial numbers.

  By the time his work was complete, ninety-six customized pacemakers had sat snugly in their titanium, laser-welded, hermetically sealed cases, awaiting delivery to hospitals and cardiologists’ offices all over the country. Thirty-two of them were miniaturized time bombs. The man could easily have made twice or three times as many, but this was more than adequate. This would kill, this would baffle, bewilder and terrify. This would master and slay dragons.

  He had dismantled his workbench and equipment, burned what he could and driven everything that could not be burned to a dump site halfway between Chicago and Gary, Indiana. He had kept precisely detailed records of what he had done, and then, for his very last trick, he had created five more sets of records, all of them equally intricate but false, so that if and when they finally tracked it down to him, he’d be able to take the torture a step further, set phoney trails, drive them crazier. Make them beg. Make them pay.

  Just two weeks into the New Year, and innocent people were dying.

  But then, they always did.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Friday, January 15th

  The new case was proving the real bitch Joe had guessed it would be. Hagen’s quality control man, Fred Schwartz, was as able and thorough as Hagen had claimed, but his steadily increasing dismay, frustration and weariness were obvious, his small mouth still set with determination but the hazel eyes ever more red-rimmed and darkly shadowed. Each nighttime since Monday had seen the factory taken systematically apart in an effort to find evidence, but not a shred had been found, and so Hagen Pacing remained, for the moment, in business. Meantime, in a secure area well away from the workforce, Schwartz was dismantling and checking every master copy and all the remaining suspect stock, assisted and overseen every inch of the way by the eagle-eyed Tony Valdez from Bomb and Arson, but their progress remained painfully slow. Checks on the backgrounds of every member, past and present, of the Hagen workforce and the freight company they used had, thus far, yielded not a single criminal record nor apparent motive. Commander Jackson, with the chief on his back, was gnawing at his well-kept fingernails, and Joe, guilt-ridden about his inability to take care of his pregnant and vulnerable wife, had suggested to Jess that she take Sal to her parents for the visit she’d been planning for months.