Dance of Death

by John Case

  This is so fucked up, she thought. Banerjee knocked. They entered.

  The room was a clean, well-lighted place that smelled bad. In the center of the room, Hakim Mussawi was strapped to a stainless-steel table under a buzzing fluorescent light. A nurse was at his side inserting an intravenous feed into his left arm. Hearing Andrea and Banerjee enter, Mussawi raised his head, then fell back in exhaustion.

  An elderly doctor in a white coat came over, smiling. “I’m Dr. Najib,” he whispered. The name bar on his coat was covered with a piece of white tape. A sensible precaution, Andrea thought.

  “How’s our patient?” Banerjee asked.

  “Oh, he’s been a bad boy,” Dr. Najib reported. “He admits nothing!”

  “Well, perhaps we can change that,” Andrea said.

  “I’m sure we can,” Dr. Najib replied. “But it may take a while. He’s a tough nut.”

  “Maybe not,” Andrea said. Reaching into her purse, she removed an ampoule of glass, and handed it to the doctor. “Have you used Anectine before?”

  Dr. Najib held the ampoule up to the light. “Not as such. What’s the generic?”

  “Succinylcholine chloride,” Andrea told him.

  Dr. Najib made a face. “In that case, yes, of course. At the hospital. We use it all the time for tracheotomies when we intubate. Makes it easier for the tube to go in.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Banerjee asked. “Relax him to death?”

  “Pretty much,” Andrea said. “The thing is, when they use it in a hospital, the patient is unconscious. I’d like Dr. Najib to administer it while our friend is awake.”

  Najib stared at Andrea. “Really!” he said. “But how can you question him? I mean, you can ask him whatever you want, but how do you expect him to answer you?”

  “Well, you’re right, of course. He won’t be able to speak. But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to ask him anything. I’m just going to talk to him for a couple of minutes and then, when the drug’s worn off, there may be one or two things that he’ll want to get off his chest.”

  Banerjee gave her a look that said, Are you nuts? Then he shook his head, as if to clear it. Finally, he said, “So, it’s painful?”

  “Not exactly,” Andrea told him.

  “What does that mean?” Banerjee asked.

  “It means it’s disturbing, but it isn’t painful.” She turned to Najib. “It might be a good idea to have a cardiac-assist pump on hand – just in case.”

  The doctor nodded in agreement, and left the room.

  Andrea turned to Banerjee. Speaking quietly, so that the man on the table couldn’t hear, she said, “Dr. Najib’s going to give him a shot of Anectine. It’s fast-acting, so –”

  “What does it do?”

  “Well,” Andrea said, “it causes paralysis. Progressively. After thirty seconds, the muscles in the face begin to go numb. Then the numbness spreads to the throat and down to the chest. The diaphragm slows, and after a minute or two, it stops pumping.”

  Banerjee thought about it. “So …”

  “It’s like turning to wood. You can feel the muscles dying, the flesh going dead. You can’t breathe, but your system’s flooded with adrenaline. So you’re in a panic, but you can’t move. It’s like a bad dream. A nightmare, only real.”

  Banerjee blanched.

  Andrea smiled that wonderful smile of hers. “Aversive conditioning. I’ve been dying to try it out in an interrogation setting.”

  “Well, I’m sure it will be interesting.” Banerjee looked unnerved.

  Andrea crossed the room. The subject was lying on his back with his eyes closed, and she could see that he’d had a hard time of it. His right arm was in an air cast, and his lower lip was split, where a tooth had gone through it. His left cheek twitched uncontrollably, and there was something wrong with the fingers of his left hand.

  Lifting his hand, she looked at it closely. His thumb was perfectly manicured, and completely intact. But his second and third fingers were missing the nails, and the two other fingers were black with blood. Someone – Banerjee or Najib – had driven something under the nails.

  She let go of his hand, which fell to the table with a soft thud. Hakim Mussawi looked at her, then just as quickly looked away.

  “We need to talk,” Andrea told him. “Do you understand English?”

  He kept his head turned to the side, and said nothing.

  She repeated the question in Arabic.

  Banerjee came over to the table. “His English is actually quite good,” the detective said. “He went to college in California. Chico State. I looked it up. That makes Mr. Mussawi a Wildcat. Isn’t that right, Mr. Mussawi?” Banerjee gave the man’s broken arm a squeeze, and watched him gasp.

  Andrea shook her head. and Banerjee let up. In a soft voice, she said, “Hakim, I want you to look at me.”

  No way.

  The door to the room opened and closed behind her. Dr. Najib wheeled an apparatus to the side of the table.

  “How much would you say he weighs?” the doctor asked.

  “Ninety kilos,” Banerjee guessed. “He’s got a gut.”

  The doctor produced a syringe. “Sixty milligrams, then.”

  While Najib readied the injection, Andrea spoke in a quiet voice. “Hakim, I want you to listen carefully. I’m an American intelligence officer. And you’re in some really deep shit. But I can get you out of here. I can make this stop. But you have to give me something.” She paused. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Nothing.

  “I’m ready,” Najib announced, holding the syringe like a handgun, with the barrel pointed toward the ceiling.

  With a sigh, Andrea made room for him at the table. “We didn’t have to do this,” she said. “And I hope we won’t have to do it again. And again. And again.”

  Mussawi began to stir.

  Banerjee laid a hand on his arm. “Stay!” The needle went in.

  Andrea looked at her Rolex. She had six minutes. One for the drug to take effect. Two for the muscles to die. Another two to suffocate. And a minute to come out of it.

  Timing was everything.

  Her watch was a Lady’s Oyster Perpetual Date, eighteen-carat gold. She’d given it to herself as a present when she made chief of station. She admired it now as the second hand swept through its first quarter turn, then another and another. When she finally looked up from the watch, she saw that Hakim’s jaws had begun to slacken. The tic in his cheek was gone, and the puzzlement in his eyes was turning to alarm.

  She said his name in an admiring and regretful way. “Hakim, Hakim … I can’t imagine how you’ve held out so long. You’ve been so brave. But no one holds out forever. No one can.”

  His head lolled on the table.

  “I want to make a deal with you, Hakim.” Three minutes. “But I don’t know if I can. The thing is, I can’t do anything for you … unless you do something for me.”

  The Anectine was roaring through his bloodstream now, crashing down a chain of neurotransmitters, wreaking havoc on his nervous system. Andrea reached down, and turned his head to face her, so that he was staring into her eyes.

  It was strange. He didn’t look as if he had a care in the world. On the contrary, he had the bland look of a man who’d died in his sleep.

  She searched his eyes, and saw that they were the color of mud, glassy, and bloodshot. The opposite of her own.

  It didn’t take a mind reader to guess what he was thinking, to guess what he was going through. Paralysis, suffocation, and panic. He was dying from the inside out.

  “I know you’ve acted against the United States in the past. So, of course, the FBI will want to talk to you. But that’s not the point.” She kept her voice steady and low, patient and slow, so that he’d hang on every word, desperate to end the moment. “That won’t get you out of here,” she said. “What gets you out of here is me. Nothing else. No one else. And it’s just like I said, I’m an intelligence officer.
Not a cop. So I’m not interested in yesterday’s news. I need to know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I need to know who’s going to happen tomorrow.” Five minutes, fifteen seconds. “If you can help me with that, we can walk out of here in half an hour. And if you can’t, well, Hakim, in that case, this goes on forever.”

  She took a step back from the table, and waited. Patiently, expectantly.

  But there was nothing. No movement at all.

  She’d killed him.

  Then a tremor rolled through his chest, and she realized that she’d been holding her breath, waiting for him to breathe.

  She glanced at her watch, and saw that she’d timed her speech perfectly, coming to the end just as his muscles began to relax.

  Suddenly, his body jerked on the table. A snarl curled from his throat, and he gasped. “There’s an American!” he said. “He’s building a machine.” He hacked up the words, and spat them out. “He says …”

  “What?”

  “He says he’s going to stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “The motor.”

  “What motor?”

  “The motor of the world.”

  Twelve

  Istanbul | February 28, 2005

  THE DOCK STRIKE lasted seven days, seven hard days given that Istanbul, with all its glories, was right there, almost close enough to touch. The smells of grilled fish and lamb wafted toward them from the ferryboat stop at Karakoy, where vendors clustered to serve the crowds of commuters. Khalid joked that they could swim from the ship to the shore. And they probably could have. But no. Without transit visas for Turkey, they were confined to the Marmara Queen.

  So Wilson worked. Day after day, he sat at the desk in his room, plugging variables into the equations he’d worked out in prison, consulting the notes he’d made while studying Yuri Ceplak’s journals at Lake Bled.

  The one problem he hadn’t been able to solve concerned the photon flux that takes place when a standing gravitational wave interacts with its electromagnetic counterpart in a static magnetic field. After the Tunguska disaster, Tesla had been nearly obsessed with the problem. And there, in Ceplak’s notebooks, was a marginal notation in Tesla’s own hand, one that turned the conundrum into an epiphany. Tesla had solved it! Wilson was now confident that he could focus the beam with astonishing precision, once he factored in the target’s harmonic.

  But first the weapon had to be miniaturized so that the focusing mechanism could be tested in the field. Among other things, this meant identifying targets that were relatively “soft” and easily accessible. Not the White House, but Hoover Dam. Not the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, where NORAD was headquartered, but the Golden Gate Bridge. Not the Pentagon, but … Culpeper.

  Wilson smiled, contemplating the damage he was going to do. It would be massive and clever, and come out of nowhere – like dry lightning on a clear day.

  He was still immersed in his equations when he heard shouting on the docks. A few minutes later, a knock on his door confirmed his suspicions. “Hasan is pleased to inform you dock strike is over!” In four hours, they were under way.

  He was asleep when the ship, having carved its way through the swell and chop of the Black Sea, hove into sight of Odessa. It was the slowing of the engines that woke him up. His heartbeat was synchronized to their vibrations, so that, when the engines slowed, it hit him like a heart attack, and jerked him wide awake.

  He dressed quickly and went out on the deck, which was slick with rain. The city was barely visible behind a curtain of fog. Sea and sky bled into each other, producing a gray wash, a sort of maritime whiteout. Which was disappointing, because Odessa promised to be an interesting city. According to the captain, at whose table Wilson had sometimes dined, Odessa had once been the Soviet Union’s largest port. “This is so,” the captain told him, “because the water is warm year-round. Everywhere else, it’s locked in ice.”

  Without the push of the engines, the ship seemed almost to be still. But that was an illusion. Styrofoam cups and cigarette butts trailed in their wake.

  Wilson shifted from foot to foot.

  Bo had left a reassuring message in the Draft folder of their Yahoo! account. Their friend in Odessa was aware of the dock strike in Istanbul, and would adjust his schedule accordingly. Relax, Bo wrote. Everything’s cool.

  That’s what Wilson told himself, but he couldn’t shrug off his unease. He fingered the red capsule Hakim had given him in Baalbek, a capsule he kept taped under his shirt collar. It worked by chemical suffocation, denying oxygen to each of the body’s cells. It was a fast and violent way to die, but it wasn’t Wilson’s way.

  Almost idly, he stripped the capsule from under his collar, and dropped it over the side.

  He could see Odessa clearly now. The docks were right in the middle of the city, with the port authority headquartered in a huge ugly concrete structure, and obscuring “the Potemkin steps” beside it.

  Wilson had read about the famous staircase in his guidebook and was anxious to see it. A broad flight of 192 steps cascading down the hillside to the Black Sea, the stairs were an architectural marvel, constructed to exaggerate normal perspective. From the base they were said to appear unimaginably steep, an effect achieved by their gradual narrowing from a width of sixty-eight feet at the bottom to forty feet at the top.

  The steps were made famous in a scene in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. In the film, czarist troops open fire on the civilians of Odessa. A mother falls. A baby carriage careens down the steps, bouncing past one body after another, its innocent occupant bound for destruction. Blood is everywhere.

  Good movie, Wilson thought. He looked forward to seeing the real thing.

  Transit visas had been arranged, the sheets of paper already attached to their passports.

  Wilson and his bodyguards were met at the foot of the gangway by a skinny guy with a bad complexion who introduced himself as Sergei. “Mr. Belov sends his apologies. He regrets that he cannot be here until tomorrow. His daughter performs in a –” He frowned, then moved his fingers as if playing a piano.

  “Recital,” Wilson said.

  “Yes!” Sergei agreed with enthusiasm. “Permit me,” he said, grabbing Wilson’s suitcase. This way.” Within ten minutes, they were through Customs, submachine guns and all. “Express line,” Khalid said. Zero giggled.

  Half an hour later, they were checking into the first-class Hotel Konstantin.

  Zero and Khalid were elated by the idea of a day at such a hotel, especially once they checked in and learned that their room had a Playstation 2 and a copy of Grand Theft Auto.

  Wilson was glad, too, because he would spend a day in the same city as Irina. Despite his fantasies about her, he was pragmatic. He knew that the women on the website were glammed up for their photos and would look, in real life, rather different. Some looked like prostitutes to him, heavily made up and showing plenty of cleavage, although that might be a cultural difference. In contrast, Irina seemed demure, like a housewife in an old sitcom. Someone who would serve tea and grow flowers.

  Wilson did not intend to call her or speak to her, but he was desperate to have a look.

  At three o’clock, he sat at a tiny table in the Cafe Mayakovsky on Deribasovskaya Street. It was a large and busy room with perhaps a dozen waitresses – his own a heavyset pink-faced brunette. He ordered tea and while he waited, fixed his eyes on the double swinging doors through which the waitresses came and went from the kitchen, trays aloft. Each wore a lacy frill pinned to her hair, and a green-checked uniform with white apron. They moved with grace and efficiency, even the older and fatter ones, gliding between the crowded tables, avoiding one another with a kind of intuitive radar, bending the knee to serve the hot drinks and dainty pastries. To Wilson, whose brain sought order and pattern everywhere, it seemed almost choreographed in its rhythm and balance, and he watched it with pleasure.

  Then he saw her.

  She came through the swinging doors, heavy tray
aloft, walking with the posture of a dancer. Wilson felt a spark of pure joy at the sight of her, probably, he thought, no more than the low-voltage shock of recognition. It was akin to the satisfaction of finding the pivotal equation, or fitting the last bolt into a construction.

  She was more petite than he’d imagined, yet her body was curvaceous. He was glad to see that. Scientific studies proved a connection between the proportion of waist-to-hip size and fertility, a biological explanation of why men were attracted to such women. Unlike in her smiling photograph, her face was set in an expression of earnest concentration as she gracefully made her way through the crowded room to a table at the window.

  He drank a second tea, watching Irina come and go from the kitchen.

  Now she was clearing a table, hoisting her tray to her shoulder and then taking a moment to survey the area – for a customer wanting a check, for a new customer, for whatever waitresses look for – when her eyes caught his.

  There was, of course, no sign of recognition on her part – he had not sent his own photograph. But he felt a quick sexual spark that took him by surprise. He held her gaze until she looked away. She was flustered and tripped on the leg of a table. Some silverware slid off her tray onto the floor and she knelt to pick it up.

  He was tempted to help her.

  Instead, he signaled his waitress and paid the bill, leaving a generous tip. Irina looked back his way once more, just before heading into the kitchen with her tray. This time, she smiled, and he returned the smile, and there was a band of sensation between them that was almost electric.

  It occurred to him that he could wait outside the restaurant. Follow her home. Find a way.

  But no, it wasn’t time. Not yet. …

  Thirteen

  Berlin | March 1, 2005

  BOBOJON SIMONI STOOD by the curb, looking up and down Yorkstrasse for a cab. Behind him, like a page from the comics, a wall of graffiti showed George Bush hanging from a streetlight, while New York burned on the bricks behind him.