Extreme Measures (1991)

by Michael Palmer

  "Please," he said, "don't do that. Don't do that. I have a five-hundred-dollar deductible that doesn't cover--"

  Eric took a roundhouse swing at his face. Subarsky blocked it with his forearm, then calmly shoved Eric backward at least ten feet and down into the mud.

  "I'm sorry this is happening, old friend," he said. "If I hadn't had to go back to my apartment to get these magic keys to use on that he-man lock over there, you would have missed us, and you wouldn't be nearly so muddy."

  Eric pushed himself to his feet. Subarsky circled around and cut him off from the road, but Eric knew he needn't have bothered. As long as Laura Enders remained the man's prisoner, he was never going to run. One way or the other, it was going to end right here.

  "Dave," he said, trying to stall until some idea, some flicker of an advantage came to him, "how can you hurt so many people just to develop a goddam drug?"

  "Hey, watch your tongue, fella. Use any delaying tactic you want. I like that, and I'd expect nothing less from you. But don't stoop to calling DS-Nineteen names. We're talking about a living antibiotic here--an antibiotic that kills viruses and keeps killing them because it mutates as fast as they do."

  "It didn't work. That's why no agency would fund its development."

  "Didn't work in a test tube or a culture bottle," Subarsky corrected. "But tinker with it, tighten a nut here, a bolt there, and stick it into a living infected person, and whammo! The field is suddenly bloody with little teeny virus corpses, including--we are about to prove--the one that causes you-know-what. Impressed?"

  Eric squinted across at him and, in spite of himself, realized that he was impressed. The government grant agencies had clearly underestimated the man's genius. Faced with, possibly the most lethal epidemic the world has ever known, they had blithely cast off one of the few scientists equal to the challenge.

  "So," Eric said, "the tetrodotoxin was your tool for diverting no-next-of-kin patients to your place in Utah. Get 'em pronounced dead, and then get 'em out of town."

  "I wish it were that simple. I tried using that doggone toxin in every way, shape, and form I could, but in the end, only the houngans could do it right. Can you believe it? A Ph.D. in biochemistry from MIT, and I've had to import my stuff from a bunch of witch doctors."

  "Enter Rebecca Darden."

  "Ah, you know about my little island princess too. Eric, you are really quite a guy. If you know, I assume ol' Haven knows as well."

  "Not yet, but I plan to tell him."

  Subarsky laughed merrily at Eric's bravado.

  "I wish you hadn't said that, pal, because now that makes you a real threat. You see, I don't think ol' Haven would approve of me."

  "He wouldn't be in the minority."

  "Oh, stop it! Be witty or be silent."

  Eric glanced about for a board or rock, but saw nothing he could use. Behind Subarsky, traffic continued splashing along Meridian, but no one even slowed. A police cruiser was about the best he could hope for. He decided to continue stalling for as long as his adversary would allow.

  "So Rebecca Darden uses the contacts her father helped her make in Haiti, and gets the powder for you."

  Subarsky slapped a spray of water from his beard.

  "She does that, yes," he said. "But mostly she uses her contacts to get cocaine for me and Lester to sell. Cocaine and some of the best poppy this side of Istanbul. How in the hell else was I going to finance my work? Lester and I tried doing it for a time with weapons, but as our operation's grown, we just haven't been able to generate enough business to meet our overhead. So we decided to diversify. We haven't abandoned the weapons business, but cocaine is much easier to handle than Uzi semiautomatics, know what I mean? Damn sight better markup, too."

  "Jesus, David, you are sick. How did you make a thug like Wheeler understand something as complex as DS-Nineteen?"

  "Simple," Subarsky said. "I just told him that the real name of the drug was Money. Once it's perfected, we bargain for amnesty if we need to, and then name our price--as in eight zeros; maybe even nine. Ol' Lester understood that kind of science. Believe me he did.

  "So we skim enough from our business endeavors to maintain life and limb, and keep sweet Rebecca in shoes, and then we throw the rest into the project. The way things are going out in Charity, another year, maybe two is all it's gonna take."

  "I don't believe it."

  "Frankly, Eric, I'm very ticked off at you, so I don't really give a damn what you believe. Things were going mighty smoothly until your friend in there showed up and turned your head. Now, with most of my teammates gone, we may have to consider a relocation--some new players, and even a new base hospital." He sighed theatrically. "Still, I have managed to salt enough away to take Rebecca on a sabbatical if I find I must."

  "You are really sad, David."

  "You're damn right I am," Subarsky shot back, his tone suddenly much harsher. "I'm sad because thanks to you, I may have to retool again. And I'm sad because I'm getting soaked and catching a chill standing here talking to an old pal from Watertown who doomed himself by being too goddam smart for his own good."

  He reached his long arms up like an attacking grizzly, and took a step forward.

  "Now," he said, "since the lovely Laura over there is absolutely positive that a certain video is locked in that trailer, and since the well-known chap buying poppy and blow from us on that tape is waiting to reward me handsomely for it, suppose you just let me--"

  Head down, Eric charged the man, hurling himself through the rain at his chest, flailing with his fists at Subarsky's face. Subarsky stumbled backward. Eric lashed out again, connecting solidly with his cheek. Then Subarsky reached out and effortlessly shoved him back to the ground.

  "Happy now?" he said. "Is it out of your system?"

  Eric looked up. He had hit the man with everything he had, yet Subarsky was merely standing there, licking at a small tear in his lower lip and smiling at him through his beard. Eric tried another onslaught, but the advantage of surprise was gone. Subarsky grabbed him by the front of his jacket and slammed him against the trailer as if he were weightless. Eric's head snapped against the metal door. His arms and legs instantly went limp, and he dropped into a muddy puddle. Before he could fight through the dizziness to react again, Subarsky was on him. Kneeling on his back, he pulled Eric's arms behind him and tied them with a short length of clothesline. Then he knelt heavily on the back of Eric's thighs, and tied his ankles with similar quickness and skill.

  "All right, then," he said, making no effort to roll Eric over or remove him from the puddle. "There being no further objections, I move we take out the magic key set and find the one that fits this Bozo lock. Do I hear a second?"

  "David, don't hurt us," Eric said, rolling onto his side. "It won't help anything to hurt us."

  "Says you," Subarsky mumbled, peering through the downpour as he sorted through a sophisticated-looking ring of keys and oddly bent wires. "Why, just wrecking my flashlight the way you did carries the goddam death penalty."

  "David, please ..."

  "Now just shut up, little fella. Sit back in your puddle, enjoy the last few moments of your earth-bound existence, and watch a master locksman at work. Believe it or not, these beauties were made by one of the engineering students at MIT. He sold them for a thousand bucks a set, and was ready to retire by the time he graduated. There's nothing they can't open."

  He selected one of the keys, examined it, and then gently inserted it into the opening at the base of the padlock. Although there was a brand name of some sort die-stamped onto the oddly shaped padlock, it had become known around Plan B as the Scottlock, out of deference to Scott Enders, who had designed it. The actual keyhole was well concealed beneath a small sliding panel at the top of the apparatus. The keyhole at the bottom was another piece of business altogether.

  As Dave Subarsky worked the key he had selected in up to its hilt, the metal tip completed an electrical circuit between a tiny lithium battery and a wire-en
closed plastic capsule. In seconds the heat from the wire coil had melted the plastic, releasing a single large drop of concentrated hydrochloric acid.

  Subarsky was dramatically humming a fragment of Bach's Concerto No. 2 in E, and gently jiggling the key, when the hydrochloric acid first touched the wad of chemically treated plastique explosive wadded into the base of the lock. He was bending over, peering at the keyhole, when the apparatus exploded.

  Eric watched in stunned horror as, in an instant, both of Subarsky's hands and a good portion of his face were blown away. Bellowing insanely, pawing at the remains of his eyes, he stumbled backward. He was still on his feet after absorbing a blast powerful enough to have actually blown a large hole in the metal door.

  Eric rolled over in time to see Subarsky, still shrieking incoherently, reel blindly past the Saab and onto Meridian Avenue. The driver of the oncoming sixteen-wheeler, high on cocaine he had bought from a dealer in Cambridge, never saw the figure lurch out of the shadows and onto the road; nor did he feel the impact when the reinforced steel grille-guard of the truck slammed into the man full force.

  What remained of the genius biochemist's right arm became entangled in the metal grate as the semi roared on through the rain. The young driver, immersed in a Guns and Roses tape, sang along as he drove, unaware of the huge, grotesque ornament suspended just below the Mack bull dog on his hood.

  Fighting the rain and a sudden profound exhaustion, Eric took nearly fifteen minutes to work free of his bonds. Then, using a rock, he smashed in the passenger window of the Saab. A minute later, he and Laura were inside the trailer. The video receiver was on a crate in the front left corner. It was enclosed in an oilskin sack, and its wire antenna had been brought out through a tiny hole drilled in the trailer wall.

  "Here," Eric said, handing the tape over. "I think you should be the one to turn this in."

  "That lock was the second time today that Scott's saved my life," Laura said.

  They huddled together in the trailer as she told him about finding her brother, their subsequent capture and escape, and Scott's death. She had eluded Lester Wheeler and his men by swimming underwater from one pier to the next. Finally, nearly unconscious from the cold, she had stumbled up the bank and onto the roadway. An elderly woman and her husband, on their way home from the market, had picked her up and brought her to their home.

  "I've got a bit of a story to tell you, too," Eric said, "but unless I get some dry clothes on soon, I may end up getting pneumonia and being taken to White Memorial Hospital. And we all know what happens to people who are brought there."

  "Not anymore it doesn't," Laura said. She jumped off the trailer and helped him to follow.

  EPILOGUE

  The ten-seat Learjet swooped down through the cloudless midmorning sky like a falcon, leveling off sharply at 2,000 feet. Inside the cabin, five passengers pressed their foreheads against the windows and peered through the glare across the stark San Rafael Desert, each one anxious to catch a first glimpse of Charity, Utah.

  "We've sighted the town, Mr. Harten," the pilot said over the intercom. "About five miles ahead at ten o'clock. We've been cleared into Moab, so if it's okay with you, I'll make a couple of passes at this altitude and then head over to the airport."

  Within three hours of receiving Laura's call at his home in Laurel, Virginia, the head of Communigistics International had the government-owned jet on the ground at Boston's Logan Airport. By 7:30 A.M. the Lear was airborne once again, streaking west. Sharing the cabin with Neil Harten were an associate of his from Plan B named Thorsen, plus Eric, Laura, and Maggie Nelson.

  Twenty-five hundred miles away, they knew, Bernard Nelson lay unconscious, hooked to a ventilator in the intensive care unit of the hospital in Moab. And from what Eric had learned from his conversation with the attending physician, the detective's condition was not good.

  Their Odyssey had begun with an early-morning phone call to Maggie Nelson from a man named Smith in Moab. From what she could tell, her husband had succeeded in finding and penetrating the facility at Charity, Utah, only to be poisoned by the head of the operation there, a physician named Barber. Details of Nelson's subsequent rescue by a Charity employee named Pike were sketchy, but apparently Barber had been shot and wounded in the process, and another employee killed. Although he was conscious when the ambulance arrived at the town, during the ride to Moab, Bernard had slipped into a coma.

  Maggie Nelson's first move had been to call Laura at Bernard's Boston apartment.

  Now, the travelers stared down in awed silence at the fantastic scene below. The town, barely a smudge on the massive landscape, was surrounded by police cruisers and ambulances. Dozens of people were milling about along the single main street. Others lay on stretchers outside a low cinder-block building.

  The pilot made two wide swings overhead, giving those on each side of the aircraft a good look. Then he banked to the east and shot across the rugged desert toward Moab. Seated next to Neil Harten at the rear of the plane, Eric briefed him on what he knew of the poison tetrodotoxin.

  With the intervention of Haven Darden, the hospital administration had allowed Eric to search the offices of Dave Subarsky and Norma Cullinet. In a locked box in the nurse's desk, he found a number of ampules of intravenous adrenaline. He also retrieved two of what appeared to be baby-food jars, each about half-filled with a coarse grayish powder. One had a small stick-on label reading simply "T."; and the other, "D."

  When confronted with the find, and a brief explanation of his daughter's role in the Charity Project, Haven Darden picked up the phone and asked Eric to wait in the corridor outside his hospital room. After just a few minutes, he called him back inside.

  "My daughter says that the powder labeled T.' is what we suspected," he said. There was great sadness in his eyes, but also undisguised relief in his voice that Rebecca had agreed to cooperate. "The other is some sort of substance to reverse the effects of the toxin. Rebecca says that the dose of the antidote is between two and five grams, and that her cohorts had been dissolving it in saline and administering it intravenously. They also used large doses of adrenaline, but she has no idea of the amount. Most of the work was done in the monitoring room at the mortuary. Later this morning, she has agreed to go with my wife and our attorney to the police."

  "I'm sorry you and your wife have to go through this, sir," Eric said.

  Darden shrugged.

  "Who knows how much of a child's behavior is the fault of the parents?" he said. "Perhaps in the long run some good will come of all this for her and for us."

  The antidote dissolved readily in sterile saline. Working on his tray table in the plane, Eric used a small scale to measure out the dose Haven Darden had suggested, and then carefully drew it up into a large syringe.

  "An IV injection of an unknown unsterile powder is not my idea of fun," he said, "but I can always treat any infection that results."

  "What's your sense of the doc in Moab?" Harten asked.

  "He seemed okay, but he wasn't too excited about administering the dose of adrenaline I've settled on."

  Together, Eric and Darden had reviewed Reed Marshall's resuscitation efforts on Loretta Leone, and had determined that his aggressive approach and repeated use of the drug had almost certainly begun reversing her toxicity and increasing the speed and force of her cardiac contractions even while she was awaiting autopsy.

  "Belts on, tray tables up, everyone," the pilot broadcast. "We're landing."

  "Are you going back up front with Laura?" Harten asked.

  Eric shook his head. Throughout the early portion of their flight, Harten had sat with her, candidly answering questions and sharing information about her brother's life of dangerous service. Over the hours that followed, Eric had seen the reality of Scott's death take hold.

  "She needs a little time by herself," he said.

  "Is she going to stay in Boston?"

  "I hope so."

  A soft squeak of the Lear's main gear
signaled the perfect landing in Moab. A police cruiser and two cars raced out to bring the passengers to the hospital. Hand in hand with Laura and Maggie Nelson, Eric hurried up the walk and straight to the ICU.

  The local internist had done a remarkable job of holding Bernard together. Although the detective was still unconscious, his blood pressure had begun responding to the massive adrenaline doses the man had given, and his kidneys had already started working.

  Neil Harten and the others waited in the small family room as Eric huddled with the internist. While they were administering the tetrodotoxin antidote and another dose of adrenaline, a stretcher bearing another patient was wheeled into the ICU.

  Eric moved to help evaluate the new arrival, and found himself staring down at the man who had once been his boss. Craig Worrell, drawn and filthy, stared blankly up at him with rheumy, jaundiced eyes.

  "His temp's one-oh-four," the ambulance attendant offered.

  "Looks like fulminant hepatitis," Eric said to the internist. "This man's a doctor from White Memorial in Boston. He was part of that Caduceus group I told you about--at least he was before he got into trouble at the hospital. I guess this is part of the Caduceus early-retirement plan."

  "He looks bad."

  "Maybe that DS-Nineteen wasn't working as well as Subarsky said it was. You want to work on him?" Eric asked.

  "Not really, but I will."

  "I'll stay with Nelson."

  In just half an hour Bernard Nelson began to show signs of responding to the treatment. Harten and his associate headed off to investigate Charity firsthand, while Laura and Maggie Nelson took up a vigil at Bernard's bedside.

  Two hours passed, during which several cardiac crises arose. Laura clutched Maggie's hand tightly as they watched Eric move from one side of the bed to the other, checking Bernard's physical condition, evaluating lab reports and the monitor pattern, and then calmly issuing instructions to the nurse. And she knew that regardless of what lay ahead for the two of them, she would never lose the admiration she was feeling for him at that moment.