Scorpion Trail

by Archer, Jeffrey

  'Go on. I won't tell the police - unless you want me to.'

  'The papers say the man in Leipzig was forced to make anthrax for some old Stan people ... Dunkel was Stasi. Last week he met Milan in Zagreb.

  Now the papers say there's a girl dying from anthrax there.'

  Gisela shivered with fear. Dunkel had fouled up, that was clear. Now he wanted to silence anyone who could give him away. That's why he'd been looking for her on Sunday.

  'What's she saying for Christ's sake?' Lorna demanded.

  Alex translated.

  'But anthrax is lethal!' she exclaimed. 'It's the stuff they thought Saddam Hussein would use in the Gulf War!'

  'And it's what Linz must have been talking about.' He turned back to the hooker. 'Milan never said anything about anthrax?'

  Gisela snorted.

  'He told me nothing. When he got to Berlin, he was crazy. Not like when I knew him before. just wanting to 10.1

  'But my God! With anthrax he could kill a thousand people at once! A thousand Muslims. Gisela, you've got to tell this to the police.'

  She shuddered.

  'You don't understand. Look, these people have long memories and long arms.

  I'll never be safe if I grass.'

  Alex rubbed his eyes.

  'So, let's just go back over this.' Had to get his mind straight. 'If you're right about the anthrax, then that Muslim rally in Munich is the sort of target Pravic would go for, yes?'

  'How should I know?' she shrugged. 'Maybe if it was to do with Tulici...'

  'Why do you say that?' he growled.

  'Tulici's what matters to Milan. He seems possessed by what he did there, don't know why. It's almost as if he was relieved by all the killings he'd done.'

  'And ... ?' Alex sensed some fog beginning to clear.

  'I'm saying the idea of killing the girl made him crazy. Like as if her death was the final bit of something. Something he can't be free of until she's dead.'

  Agitated, Alex grabbed Lorna's arm. 'Vildana ... She thinks he'll go for Vildana again.'

  'But surely she'll be safe in the hospital with the police there . .'

  He nodded. Then a cold hand gripped him. Safe? What were they saying? A gunman might be stopped by police barriers, but bacteria wouldn't!

  'Lorna . . .'

  'I know. I just thought of it too.'

  Alex touched Gisela's still damp shoulder. 'We must go to the hospital.

  You'll come with us?'

  'What hospital?' She stared at him wide-eyed.

  'The Universitatsklinik at Sembach on the south side of Frankfurt.'

  She gasped.

  'It's a new hospital, yes? Maybe three years old?'

  'Could be. Why?'

  The blood drained from her face.

  'That was his last job. Before he went back to Bosnia to fight. Milan helped install the ventilation in that place?'

  Alex pounded through the entrance lobby and hammered on the 'up' button of the elevator, Lorna a few seconds behind. No police in sight, and only one of their vans parked outside. Had the lawmen stopped worrying about the hospital because of Munich?

  Gisela had refused to come. If Pravic was here, and he saw her, she'd be dead.

  'Come on, come on!' Alex thundered at the slowness of the lift.

  'Let's take the stairs,' Lorna suggested.

  'Maybe ... hang on though. Here it is.'

  The doors closed behind them.

  'There must be a thousand people in this hospital,' Alex panted. 'Patients, staff, visitors. My God, it's terrifying. He could be pumping the stuff in this very minute.' He glanced up nervously at the ventilation grill on the roof of the lift.

  'Shouldn't we call Linz? You've got his mobile number,' she said.

  'Better to talk to the police here first.'

  On the fourth floor they pelted down the corridor towards ward F. As they approached Vildana's room, a green-uniformed officer got up from a chair, unbuttoning the flap of his pistol holster.

  Alex slowed to a walk. A different face from yesterday, young, suspicious, hostile.

  He explained first who they were, then mentioned Kommissar Linz, Pravic and anthrax in a jumble of semi-comprehensible German.

  A second officer emerged from the room. These men were sentries, unversed in the complexities of the case. They stared at Alex as if he'd landed from Mars.

  'Who did you say you are?' one of them asked.

  'The name's Crawford. We rescued her from Bosnia, the girl in there.

  Colonel Roche ... is his wife here? She'll tell you who we are.'

  He made to push open the door, but his way was barred.

  'Your I.D. please...'

  'Look, for heavens' sake, this is terribly urgent. You must search the hospital!'

  The second officer held up a radio and mouthed into it, while the first studied Alex's passport.

  'Kommissar Linz knows me. He knows what I'm talking about,' Alex insisted.

  'Can you call him on that radio?'

  'Linz? Linz?' They shook their heads.

  'From Wiesbaden. The Bundeskriminalamt.'

  'Ah. We are from Hessen. We have no connection.'

  'The card!' Lorna whispered. 'In your pocket.'

  Alex pulled it out. 'This is the number of his mobile. He's on the way to Munich.'

  'Yes, but for a telephone you must go downstairs. In the main entrance.'

  Alex grabbed Lorna's arm and hustled her back to the lift.

  'I don't believe this,' he hissed. 'Whatever happened to ruthless German efficiency?'

  'Come on, they're only rookies,' Lorna soothed. 'Call Linz, then we'll talk to the administrator.'

  Downstairs they discovered the phones took cards, not cash. Lorna scuttled to the newspaper stand to buy one.

  After a minute she came running back.

  'We can only buy cards at a post office!' she howled.

  'Come on!' He led her towards the reception desk.

  Just then two more policemen marched through the revolving doors. He guessed the officers on the fourth floor had become suspicious and called them in to see what he was up to, Alex stopped in his tracks.

  'Time to split up,' he breathed. 'Get hold of the administrator. Tell him what's happening. Use the phone to call Linz. Get the official wheels moving.'

  'And you?' Lorna asked.

  'I'm going to look for Pravic!'

  'For God's sake be careful!'

  He turned her towards the rapidly approaching policemen, then slipped through a doorway to the emergency stairs.

  'Excuse me,' Lorna shouted, blocking the path of the officers, 'do either of you gentlemen speak English?'

  Alex ran up two floors, then entered a wide corridor identical to the level where Vildana lay. A strong smell of disinfectant. He walked briskly to the far end. More stairs. He was aiming for the roof. No clear plan, but that's where the air-conditioning must be.

  Crazy to be searching for Pravic on his own. What would he do if he found him?

  He reached the top floor, then a spur of stairs took him to a fire exit on the roof. A push on the bar and he was out onto flat asphalt, edged with a low wall.

  He was at one end of the hospital now. Looking back towards the middle of the building he saw a square brick construction that he guessed must house the winding gear for the lifts. Next to it were the ventilation fans.

  His heart pounded from the exertion of running up the stairs - and with fear. He stood there bemused, half expecting to see the killer doing something with the machinery, though he had no idea what.

  Anthrax. Was it a liquid? A gas? A box full of microbes? He'd assumed it would have to be fed into the air supply, but he didn't know. Guessing. In the same way he was guessing Pravic would be here and not Munich.

  Overhead a 747 climbed noisily out of Rhein-Main, heading east. From somewhere below, the siren of an arriving ambulance. Alex felt ridiculous suddenly. Here he was playing the sleuth without even the humblest qualificati
on for the job.

  'It's only in the movies that they end with a roof chase ... he reminded himself.

  Now what? Better check since he was here. Awkwardly, feeling as if some hidden eye were watching him, he began to walk towards the fans.

  He felt absurdly exposed. If Pravic was here, and he still had his gun, there'd be nowhere to hide.

  The technical manager at the Universitatsklinik Sembach had his office on the ground floor. It was an untidy room cluttered with filing cabinets, and on the wall behind his desk was a board from which hung the keys to all the maintenance spaces in the building.

  He stared quizzically at the man hovering near the door, whose blue overalls were so crisp they could have been bought that morning. The surprise visitor carried a toolbag, seemed to be sweating a lot, and had just announced that he'd come to test the fire dampers.

  Milan Pravic had never been good at bluff, but this time it had to work.

  The last thing he wanted was to have to use the gun and alert the whole place to his presence. The man behind the desk was the same technician who'd organized the handover when the constructors finished building the hospital twenty-six months before.

  The manager tapped a pen on the desk. He'd not been expecting this visit, but it was perfectly normal to have random checks on the system that closed the ventilation in the event of a fire. And even though the man claimed to have left his I.D. card at home, he distinctly remembered his face.

  He plucked a bunch of keys from the panel behind him and held them out.

  Pravic grabbed them, grunted his thanks, then walked briskly back to the main entrance lobby.

  Lucky so far.

  Now he had to find the girl. The TV and the papers hadn't revealed which ward she was in, and it wasn't a question he could easily ask.

  Using the main stairs by the lift lobby, he ascended floor by floor, peering into each main corridor looking for signs. On the fourth he found them. Two policemen, chatting. Outside a ward.

  His neck prickled at the thought of being so close, the same way it had in Pfefferheim. She was the last. The end of the line. With Vildana Muminovic dead, Tulici could breed no more monsters to torment him.

  His nights were still haunted by his childhood terror of that place.

  Living half a Hometre away on the same side of the valley, he'd walked through Tulici every day to reach his school. An undersized runt of a boy, a misfit even amongst his own, he'd been picked on by the youngsters there. Frail for a teenager, he'd been mocked for his weediness and skulking ways. Once, three boys and three girls had taken him to a cow barn, stripped him, rolled his hairless body in slurry, mocked his immature genitalia and urinated on his face.

  One final score to settle and Tulici would have paid the price.

  The chief administrator of the Universitatsklinik was in his thirties, chubby-faced, wearing a shiny, grey suit and spectacles with fashionable, bright-red frames. He listened to Lorna with an expression of growing disbelief One of the police officers stood watchfully by the door.

  'My English is not so good,' he responded when she'd finished. 'You tell me the name Kommissar Linz. He I know. So you telephone him, and then I will speak.' He pushed a phone across the desk.

  'Good,' Lorna sighed. Sense at last.

  She dialled the number. Linz replied within seconds from his car on the autobalm heading south. Lorna talked for two minutes, listened for less, then handed the phone back to the man with red spectacles.

  Linz had heard her story without comment. He'd told her he would call the Hessen police for reinforcements and head for the hospital himself Lorna almost wept that he'd taken her so seriously.

  The administrator's cheeks seemed to sag as he listened to Linz's voice.

  He pulled off his glasses and wiped sweat from his eyes with a handkerchief

  Ja, ist gut, Herr Kommissar. Machen wir.' He put the phone down. 'He say we must search the hospital,' he explained.

  The policeman by the door told him they'd have a hard job, with only f~ur officers on duty. The administrator scratched his head, grabbed the phone again and dialled an internal number.

  'K'dnnien Sie bitte sofort hierherkommen?' he asked. He listened for the acknowledgement, then replaced the receiver. 'The technical manager,' he explained sombrely. 'He will come.'

  He flopped back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. His carefully brushed hair looked ruffled.

  'This cannot be true,' he gabbled. 'I have three hundred-and-eighty ill peoples here.'

  Up on the roof, Alex stepped warily behind the whirring fans. Nobody here and no sign of anything being tampered with. Daft. He'd been jumping to conclusions. The wrong ones. He began to suspect Pravic was miles away.

  Hang on ... If fresh air was sucked in here it had to be pumped to the wards through ducts, which probably passed into the building via the lift shaft, judging by the location of the fans. Better head down again. There was more to check if he was to be sure.

  A fire door identical to the one at the far end of the roof opened when he pulled it. Back on the main staircase, he descended to the fourth floor. Vildana's floor.

  He emerged into the lift lobby, from which the ward corridors stretched in two directions. Beside him were the double doors of the elevators. His eye was caught momentarily by a maintenance man in blue overalls opening what looked like a broom cupboard on the far side of the lobby. At his feet was a tool bag. Alex looked away, stepping forward to see along the corridor to ward 4F. Still there, the two policemen. Looking bored.

  Maintenance man?Jesus! He was a couple of steps from the cupboard. The man had opened the door and was disappearing into it.

  Couldn't be Pravic, though. This man had dark hair.

  Then the man turned to check no one was watching

  Their eyes met, this time. And locked. The killer's eyes. Fear washed over him, such as he'd never felt before.

  The cold, pale eyes of the Scorpion.

  Pravic froze. The face opposite was familiar. Dangerously so. Images of the Pfefferheim pavement forty-eight hours before. A man with a beard, running after the car. He recognized him.

  In a second he propelled himself from the doorway, just as Alex turned to shout the alarm, jerked the pistol from his overalls and pressed its barrel into Alex's chest, throwing a hand over his mouth.

  'Womm mit!' he growled, wrestling him towards the maintenance room. Alex struggled, but a sharp prod from the barrel quietened him. Pravic shoved him inside, followed, then pulled the door shut.

  'Du sags nix! Du machs nix! The voice hoarse, the gun barrel jabbing. He pointed to the ground and told him to sit.

  Pravic stared hard at the hunched figure on the floor, as if the intensity of his look might penetrate the man's mind. Mo was he?

  My was he here? Was he the man who had adopted the girl?

  What to do with him, that was the question ... Couldn't let him live. But a gunshot would give him away ... Best to beat his head to pulp, maybe.

  He turned the pistol in his hand ...

  Alex felt the bare concrete cold beneath his backside', his heart thudding, his head slumped. Avoid eye contact. The words a mantra, like at the ambush in the canyon. Nothing else to cling to. But he sensed Pravic's intentions, cringed in anticipation of the blow.

  He waited. Then he inched his stare up from the floor. Saw the grubby black combat boots beneath the blue trouser legs. Took in the tight confines of the maintenance space, two metres wide and a metre deep.

  Blinked in the glare from the bare bulb in the ceiling.

  Pravic relented. There'd be noise if he beat the man. He'd keep him cowed. Less of a risk.

  He transferred the gun to his left hand, backing away as far as space would allow. No time to lose. He reached into his bag and grabbed a rechargeable electric drill. Had to press on. Nothing, nothing must prevent him from doing what he had to do.

  Behind him a square sheet-metal duct passed from ceiling to floor - the down pipe from the fans on the roof
High up, an extension branched at right-angles - the air supply to the wards.

  Alex saw the black power tool. For a moment he thought Pravic was going to use it on him, to puncture his brain. In the tight, claustrophobic box, with the ventilation roaring in the ducts, his mind and his guts turned to treacle.

  Had to do something. Not just his own life at stake. Hundreds would die if the madman wasn't stopped.

  Run for help? No chance. Pravic would cut him down.

  Grab the gun? Crazy even to think of it.

  Pravic kicked against a stack of bricks cemented to the floor as a mi ounting block. Still with an eye on Alex, he stepped up to reach the high, horizontal duct. He glanced away just long enough to locate the drill bit against the panel, then began to cut a hole in its side.

  His ears just centimetres from the air pipes, the noise thundered like the fire that had scorched through the homes of his tormentors in Tulici three weeks ago. At the time of the attack, he'd imagined those flames, the executions and the bitter-sweet defilement of the young woman would be enough to erase the taunting memories, and stop the mocking voices in his head. But it hadn't been. Silencing them needed one last act.

  The hole finished, he stuffed the drill back in the bag, then reached further in, feeling for soft rubber.

  Alex saw the gas mask and gulped. An object turned by history into the definitive badge of evil. The moment had come. Pravic was about to commit a monstrous, silent massacre - unless Alex could stop him.

  'Mach's nichi!' he croaked, lamely. 'Don't do it. Think of all the innocent . . .'

  'Halt's Maul! Pravic snapped, pulling the mask over his head.

  Alex looked into the goggled eyes, watched Pravic crouch by the bag. Saw the paint-sprayer - and the deadly brown liquid that swirled inside its clear, plastic reservoir.

  He held his breath, as if the very nearness of the anthrax spores meant death. He had to stop him. Had to! He tensed his legs.

  Pravic stood up, his overalls glued to his sweaty back. He remounted the bricks and aligned the sprayer with the hole. Alex's movement caught his eye. He clicked back the pistol hammer. If it was the only way to ensure he could complete his task, he'd shoot.