Rules of Vengeance

by Christopher Reich

  “Two minutes,” said Jonathan. “Be at the front door.” He watched Lazio slide through the crowd, the picture of elegance and good manners. Then a very different image of Lazio came to him. He saw the doctor being dragged along a dirt road by an angry mob armed with machetes and clubs. He saw Lazio crying out for someone to help him, his wonderfully groomed hair a mess, his face clawed, his shirt hanging in tatters. The Italian hadn’t been so suave and polished then, thought Jonathan.

  He opened the wallet and studied the image on the driver’s license. He looked at the dancing eyes, the easy smile, the facile expression. He was looking at a fraud.

  Jonathan jumped off his stool and elbowed his way through the crowd in a rush toward the bathroom. He paused at the entry and gently opened the door.

  “He’s here, I tell you,” came Lazio’s voice from inside a stall. “That Dr. Ransom. The man wanted for the bombings in London. No, I am not crazy. I know him. I am a doctor, too. We worked together. He is the same man I saw on the news.”

  Jonathan kicked open the stall, grabbed the phone out of Lazio’s hands, and severed the connection.

  “Leave me alone,” shouted Lazio. “You have nothing on me. You can’t make me help you. What have you done? You are a terrorist.”

  Jonathan shoved him against the wall. Lazio’s head snapped against the tile and a stunned look came into his eyes. “Listen to me,” said Jonathan, fingers curled around Lazio’s collar. “I had nothing to do with what happened with the bombing in London. Nothing! Do you understand? And I have plenty on you. Five patients died under your care because you were too drunk to do your job.”

  “That was years ago,” retorted Lazio. “Ancient history. I’ve been sober ever since. No one pressed charges then, and they won’t now. Are you going to bring a bunch of Africans to the stand? Where’s your proof? I’ll deny it, and that will be that. And who are you to be telling me what to do? I saw your picture on the television. You’re a wanted man.”

  Jonathan released his grip and Lazio fell back against the wall. He was right, of course. No one would help. It was only then that Jonathan realized that he could never go back to work, for DWB or anyone else. This wasn’t a case of malpractice in a forgotten corner of a Third World country. It was a terrorist act against a ranking government dignitary, an act that had taken seven lives. Innocent or guilty, he would be forever tainted by his mere proximity to the crime.

  He decided then that if he were a criminal, he’d better start acting like one. Slipping a hand behind his back, he freed the pistol he’d taken from Prudence Meadows and jabbed it into Lazio’s gut. “Last chance.”

  For the first time Lazio appeared genuinely frightened. “Okay, okay, I’ll help,” he said.

  Jonathan rammed the pistol further into the man’s belly. “Did you tell the police where you were?”

  Lazio shook his head. “I didn’t have time.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  Lazio nodded violently.

  “Okay, then, we’re going to walk out of here,” said Jonathan. “You’re going to take me to your car, and from there we’re going to drive to your office. If you help me out, we’ll be finished by morning. I’ll disappear from your life and you’ll never see me again. Do we have a deal?”

  “Yes. Deal.”

  Keeping a hand on Lazio’s arm, Jonathan led the doctor out of the restaurant. Clusters of youths stood on the sidewalk, smoking, laughing, arguing. Mopeds zipped by. “Which way is your car?”

  Lazio looked in both directions, hesitating.

  “Which way?” asked Jonathan.

  Lazio pointed to a silver Ferrari parked illegally 10 meters up the street. “That’s it.”

  “Of course it is.” Just then Jonathan heard the siren. He looked over his shoulder. Across the piazza, a Fiat belonging to the Italian carabinieri pulled into the square, slowing to a crawl as pedestrians scattered. He looked at Lazio. Of course the man had lied.

  Lazio yanked his arm free and began to run down the street. Jonathan slipped on a cobblestone, regained his balance, and started after him. He caught him after ten strides and threw him against the wall of the basilica. “Go ahead, then. Shout. This is your chance. If you’re so sure no one will care about what you’ve done, yell for the police.”

  Lazio’s eyes darted here and there, but he remained quiet.

  “In your car,” said Jonathan. “Or I will shoot you. Right here. Right now.”

  “Okay,” said Lazio. “In that case, we’d better hurry.”

  40

  Luca Lazio’s private practice was located in a three-story travertine villa in the Parioli district, adjacent to the Borghese Gardens. In contrast to Trastevere’s pulsing nightlife, the neighborhood was sleepy and peaceful, the winding, leafy streets split between businesses and residences.

  Lazio unlocked the door and showed Jonathan inside. “So what’s it all about? You didn’t get your picture all over CNN for nothing.”

  “It’s a mistake,” said Jonathan.

  “A rather large one, it seems.”

  Jonathan followed Lazio past the reception desk and through a maze of hallways. Lazio was a dermatologist, and his practice looked more like a day spa than a medical office. Everywhere there were potted plants and posters of men and women with tight, radiant skin, advertising the benefits of one laser treatment or another.

  Lazio reached the end of the hall and flipped on the lights to his private office. “Is it to do with her?” he asked, tossing his keys onto his desk. “Emma?”

  “Something like that.” Jonathan exchanged glances with the Italian, sensing that Lazio was holding something back. “Did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “About Emma. What she was doing.”

  “She was working with you, no?”

  Jonathan waited a moment, searching Lazio’s features for a sign, some indicator, but saw nothing. “It’s better if you stay out of this.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Lazio sat and powered up his computer. “So, my friend, what are we looking for?”

  Jonathan came around to his side of the desk. “Emma told me she was hurt when she was here last.”

  “A knife wound, you said?”

  “Yes. I’m certain she would have gone to an emergency room. I want to find out where she was treated and by whom. Can you access a hospital’s admissions records?”

  “There is no central registry of patients, but I’m friendly with the chief of surgery at all the major hospitals in the city. If I pass them Emma’s name, they will be able to tell me in a matter of minutes if she was ever a patient. Emergency room admission, you say … let’s see …”

  “Emma didn’t use her name.”

  Lazio stopped typing and glanced up. “Excuse me?”

  “She wouldn’t have been admitted under the name Emma Ransom,” said Jonathan. “She would have used something else. Try Eva Kruger or Kathleen O’Hara.”

  Eva Kruger was the name Emma had used in Switzerland, while posing as an executive at an engineering firm covertly manufacturing and exporting high-speed centrifuges to Iran for use in the enrichment of uranium. He knew less about Kathleen O’Hara. The name belonged to a false passport Emma had kept. One of her get-out-of-jail cards, she called it.

  Instead of typing, Lazio rolled his chair away from the desk and gazed at Jonathan, saying nothing.

  “She was an agent,” Jonathan explained. “An operative. She worked for the United States government. Emma’s not even her real name. I didn’t say it would be easy to find her. If it was, I wouldn’t have come to you.”

  “Was she involved in this affair in London? This bombing?”

  It was Jonathan’s turn not to speak. Silence was its own affirmation.

  “So you’re hoping to find her yourself?” asked Lazio. “Before the police do it for you?”

  “Just look.”

  Lazio slid his chair closer to the desk. “So,” he began, with a renewed gusto, “shall we say a
foreign woman with a knife wound …”

  “In the lower back.” Jonathan indicated a spot above his left pelvis. “She said there was damage to her kidney. If that’s the case, a thoracic surgeon would have been called in. I saw the scar. It was no outpatient procedure. And put down that she was allergic to penicillin.”

  “Do you have a picture I can scan and send along with the request?”

  Jonathan took two photographs from his wallet. One was of Emma as he knew her. It showed her in jeans and a white T-shirt, a red bandana around her neck and sunglasses pushing her wavy auburn hair out of her face. The other was of quite a different woman. It came from a driver’s license he’d discovered belonging to Eva Kruger. The photo showed a stern face, sleek hair pulled severely back from the forehead, heavy mascara behind stylish glasses, plenty of lipstick. But there was no mistaking the eyes. It was Emma, too.

  Without comment, Lazio scanned the photographs into his desktop, then completed the messages and e-mailed them to his colleagues at the seven largest hospitals in the Rome metropolitan area. “Done,” he said. “I’ll call them in the morning to make sure they’ve received the message.”

  “Call them now,” said Jonathan. “Say she’s a relative or one of your girlfriends. I want an answer within the hour.”

  “Are you going to wave that gun at me again?”

  Jonathan grabbed the Italian by the collar. “No,” he said, yanking him close. “I’m not going to wave the gun at you. I’m going to ram it down your throat and pull the trigger if you don’t do what I just told you.”

  “I believe you’ve made yourself clear.”

  Jonathan listened as Lazio placed call after call, first apologizing then hectoring his colleagues to contact the hospital and perform a check of emergency room admissions. Lazio spoke in short rapid bursts, like a well-trained machine gunner, throwing in medical slang that all doctors tend to use too frequently. Jonathan had trouble following the conversation. He was fatigued, and his efforts to make sense out of Lazio’s words only made him more tired.

  “Espresso?” asked Lazio, after a time had passed. “It will keep you awake.”

  “Yeah,” said Jonathan. “Sure.”

  Lazio rose and Jonathan shot to his feet.

  “It is okay,” said Lazio. “I am only going to the pantry down the hall. We have a refrigerator, too. Perhaps you would like something to eat.”

  “Just the espresso,” said Jonathan. “Hurry it up.”

  “It will be a minute. That is all.”

  “Fine.” Jonathan followed him to the alcove. Satisfied there was no way out, he walked up and down the corridor, shaking out his legs, trying to rouse himself. Lazio appeared quickly enough with two cups of espresso. Jonathan drank his in a gulp.

  “More?” asked Lazio.

  “Sure,” said Jonathan. Then: “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The two men returned to Lazio’s office and the Italian resumed his calls. Ten minutes later, Jonathan had his answer.

  “You were right,” said Lazio. “She was here. She was admitted to the Ospedale San Carlo on April nineteenth.”

  Jonathan slid to the edge of his chair. “The Ospedale San Carlo— where’s that?”

  “Close by. Also in the Parioli district.”

  “Go on.”

  Lazio motioned for calm. “A foreign woman with wounds consistent with those you describe was brought to the hospital by ambulance at nine forty-five in the evening and underwent surgery an hour later for a torn kidney. She stayed two days and was checked out against the advice of her physician. She possessed no identification and gave her name only as Lara.”

  “Lara?”

  “Yes.”

  Lara. The name meant nothing to Jonathan. “What about a last name?”

  “She gave none. She was listed as an NCP—a noncompliant patient. Fortunately for you, the nurse who admitted her is on duty this evening. She recognized the photograph of your wife.”

  “Which photo?” asked Jonathan.

  “I don’t know,” said Lazio. “Does it matter?”

  Jonathan said no. His head began to throb, and he closed his eyes for a moment. Lara. Where had she picked up that name? The thought came to him that it might have been someone else altogether. “What about the penicillin? Did the records say that she was allergic to penicillin?”

  “I printed a copy for you to read.” Lazio handed Jonathan a sheaf of papers and sat down on the arm of his chair. Line by line, the Italian ran through the documents, pointing out the time and date of arrival, the patient’s height and weight. Emma had given her age as twenty-eight. She was in fact thirty-two. That also sounded like her.

  When Lazio came to the details of the surgery, Jonathan asked that he read slowly. He was anxious to know the extent of the injury. The knife had penetrated three inches into Emma’s abdomen, nicking the kidney and puncturing the wall of her stomach. The report noted that the patient had blood type AB negative and that during the surgery she had required transfusions totaling six pints of blood.

  Six pints. Nearly two-thirds of her blood supply.

  Jonathan put down the page. He was trained to listen dispassionately, but he’d never had to apply that emotional distance to his wife. “You’re certain that she didn’t provide a last name?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You said she checked out against the doctor’s will? How did she settle her bill?”

  “Someone paid it for her.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t have that information. It says here that all charges were taken care of to the hospital’s satisfaction.”

  Jonathan grabbed the papers out of Lazio’s hands and rifled through them until he came to the last page. The bill for Emma’s stay totaled some twenty-five thousand euros. Over thirty thousand dollars. He breathed deeply, suddenly feeling hot, his throat thick and uncomfortable. Who in the world would have paid that kind of bill?

  Lazio observed him with concern. “Are you all right? Would you like another espresso?”

  “Yeah, sure,” answered Jonathan distractedly. Something more important than espresso had caught his attention. He had come to a line at the bottom of the page listing the “Name of Responsible Party” who had checked her out. As Lazio had said, there was no name. There were, however, initials: “VOR S.A.”

  Lazio brought another espresso. Jonathan gulped it down, his eyes glued to the page. VOR S.A. “S.A.” stood for société anonyme, the French equivalent of corporation. It was a business, then, that had paid. He set down the cup, then flipped back to the first page. There had to be more information. Something that could shed more light on the circumstances, something that would hint at the nature of the enterprise that had paid the staggering bill.

  Under “Details of Admittance,” it was noted that Emma, or in this case Lara, had been transported to the hospital by ambulance. But from where? He moved his finger across the line, struggling to make out the handwritten entries. Squinting, he made out the words “picked up patient at Civitavecchia at 2030.”

  “Civitavecchia,” he said aloud.

  Jonathan shook his head. Civitavecchia was an ancient port on the coast, nearly 80 kilometers from Rome. He knew the town because he’d been there on his honeymoon with Emma. An overnight stay en route to the airport. She’d insisted on visiting the historical seaside town, saying that she’d read about it as a child and had always dreamed of visiting.

  Civitavecchia.

  Where Emma had friends. Friends who no doubt predated her courtship with Jonathan.

  He glanced up at Lazio, shielding his eyes from the overhead lamp’s harsh glare. His face felt more flushed than before, and he was finding it difficult to breathe. He put a finger on his wrist, and was surprised to find his pulse racing. It was the fatigue. He was exhausted. That was all. He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing away the discomfort.

  “Isn’t there a hospital with a decent emergency room closer to Civitavecchia tha
n this Ospedale San Carlo?” he asked.

  “I imagine so.”

  “Which one?”

  Lazio didn’t answer.

  “Which one?” Jonathan repeated. At that moment, a shiver passed the length of his spine and his eyelids clenched shut for a long, quivering second. He stood. There was a ringing in his ears and he was dizzy. Worse, he could barely breathe. In the space of five seconds, his airway had nearly closed. He was going into anaphylactic shock. He looked at the empty espresso cup. “You,” he gasped, stumbling toward Lazio. “What did you do to me?”

  Lazio backed toward the door. “Penicillin,” he said. “You are allergic, too. I remember you were ill and we had to be careful what antibiotic to prescribe. Don’t worry. I won’t let you die. I have some epinephrine in the other room. As soon as you lose consciousness, I’ll administer enough to keep you breathing until the police arrive.”

  “Get it now!” Jonathan pulled the gun from his belt, but dropped it to the floor. He fought for his breath. He had a minute, no more, before he’d lose consciousness. He collapsed against the desk, knocking a lamp to the floor. “A chair …” he wheezed.

  Lazio hesitated, then rushed to put a chair behind Jonathan. As he did, Jonathan charged, striking the man in the chest and driving him into the wall. The jarring motion forced a breath of air into Jonathan’s lungs, and before Lazio could react, before he could raise a hand to defend himself, Jonathan punched him in the chin.

  Lazio slid to the floor, unconscious.

  Jonathan stumbled down the hall. Whatever jolt he’d experienced was seeping out of him rapidly. He pushed open the door to a treatment room and yanked at the cabinets. Clumsily, he searched for a drug that would counteract the penicillin. Prednisone. Benadryl. Epinephrine. Where was the damn epinephrine Lazio had talked about? He found nothing of use. The room began to dim. He collapsed to a knee, then summoned his strength, stood, and willed himself down the hall and into the next room. Shaking hands clawed at a cabinet. He saw a word he recognized. Adrenaline. He grabbed at the box, knocking a dozen behind it onto the counter. He fumbled with the packaging, ripped off the cover, and freed the vial.