The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  The child stretched, and turned face up, her round cheeks and black hair tinged with gold from the glow of her Donald Duck night light. But she continued to sleep soundly, her breathing calm and regular.

  The same foreboding that had invaded Wey Chen’s dreams intruded, causing her to think, Could she protect Jade from all that had been set in motion?

  Tiptoeing back to her own room, she opened another window, allowing more air to flow freely through the house, and returned to bed. Though big enough for two, she slept only in her half, leaving what had been her husband’s portion undisturbed. It had been that way since they took him away again.

  She dared not sleep anymore, lest the nightmare return. This one in particular had haunted her over the years. The reports out of Hawaii had resurrected it in stunning detail, forcing her to once more witness “the example” from so many years ago--Thursday, March 18, 2003, 5:30 A.M. to be exact, barely a week after the installation of Wang Jiawei as premier. More than just another lesson to instill fear, it had been her initiation to Military Base 682, Research Division, Code name Dragon, in North Guangdong Province.

  The dream version always began when Dr. Hoang Lee raised his head the instant he heard the jailers coming down the hall.

  Keys jangled. The leather soles of their boots slapped the concrete with a hollow cadence. A bolt in an iron door clicked open and the rusty hinges let out a metallic shriek.

  Despite his having tried to prepare himself, Hoang shrank to the back of his cell, jamming his tall frame in the tiny space between a stained, cracked toilet and the crumbling plaster wall. He clutched a rusted pipe that had occasionally delivered a brown flush to wash his waste from sight, and the cold moisture on its surface squeezed through his fingers. While the familiar stench of urine and sewer gas filled his nostrils, the whimpers and sobs from the other prisoners grew louder in the darkness. More keys clinked. A man started to scream in a high-pitched gibberish of Cantonese, Mandarin, and indecipherable howls. Hoang’s own determination to go with dignity shattered like glass.

  “Please get me through this,” he said, his voice a dry croak.

  At the time he’d looked over to Wey Chen, pleadingly, as if he wanted her near him, but she stayed rooted at the side of the cell, barely able to imagine his terror, sticking to the same spot where she’d stood since they had ordered her to spend his last hours with him.

  But in the dream, she found herself inside his thoughts.

  He repeated the appeal for strength over and over, a mantra to no specific God, grasping for any higher power to sustain him as he clung to the pipe, strangling it between his hands, listening to them drag each prisoner into the hall. The guards worked their way down the line, finally appearing in the gloom at the bars of his own small cubicle.

  His head swooned in slow circles, and a ghostly moaning came from his throat. He closed his eyes and whispered, “Xiao Hun,” the name of his little boy, summoning up an image of the child’s face, then clinging to it as he would a photograph.

  He’d talked to Wey Chen of little else but his son during those final hours. He told her how the feel of the boy’s small arms around his neck stayed with him. How his words of farewell--Good night, Daddy. See you soon--were as innocent and ordinary as any others when it came time for Hoang to leave Beijing and journey south. In the dream she relived the parting as if she’d been Hoang himself. “See you soon,” he’d repeated, ruffling his three-year-old’s dark hair, never imagining it would be their ultimate goodbye.

  “On your feet!” The order came as hands grabbed his shoulders and yanked him free of his hold on the pipes.

  He struggled as they dragged him into the corridor and along its chipped floor, out to the open courtyard. In the luminous gray of first light he could see his colleagues already kneeling, still dressed in the same laboratory overalls that they’d all been wearing when the accident occurred. But that had been over a month ago. Their outfits were now crumpled and covered in a month’s worth of human filth. Most had resigned themselves to their fate, remaining motionless, their arms hanging limply at their sides and heads bowed. A row of uniformed soldiers stood behind them, guns drawn, a line of black muzzles pointed at the napes of exposed necks. Everyone’s breath showed silver in the frosty air, rising above the condemned like departing spirits.

  One of the doomed men rocked back and forth, keening like a disturbed child. A few others cried. The man who’d been screeching back in the jail, a molecular biologist who’d trained in Hong Kong, took off his watch and shook it at one of the guards, as if that might buy back his life.

  Off to one side stood an ambulance, a group of people in surgical gear huddled around the rear door, Styrofoam picnic hampers lined up at their feet.

  Soon the molecular biologist would give up more than his watch.

  “This is murder!” Hoang said, his voice much louder.

  But the soldiers remained stone-faced, his protest as futile as an animal’s screech when the jaws of its predator begin to close.

  Not that Hoang Lee could expect otherwise.

  He’d watched them put a bullet in the head of the director within hours of the error. That hearing had taken twenty minutes. Their own trial lasted at least an hour. Treason the charge. Guilty the verdict. The sentence--purge them all before they could reveal what had happened. Then the wait. Rumor had had it that the new premier would be named anytime now and might pardon them. After all, it had only been a small leak from a research center that officially didn’t exist, and the virus only killed three people. Local health authorities ought to be able to cover that up.

  He’d confided all this to Wey Chen back in the cell, consumed with bitterness at having been fed such feeble hopes only to have them dashed. His lips, locked in a grimace, could barely spit out the words.

  A soldier pushed him to his knees.

  “What lie will you tell our families?” Hoang asked.

  He’d also told Wey Chen of his dread that Xiao Hun would grow up thinking his father had been a traitor.

  His question echoed off the walls of that bleak space, unanswered,

  He grew more frantic, and cursed the men who, after using his work, would sacrifice him like this. He roared out his hope that they’d be found out, and suffer the same fate. He ranted that that might just happen, if someone saw the distinct cluster of three bird-flu cases and calculated the odds.

  A guard stepped forward, carrying a stack of bowls, shoving one before each prisoner.

  Rice--the traditional last meal.

  The man next to him grabbed up his serving and wolfed it down.

  Their jailers had advised that the food helped deaden the terror.

  Others tried to eat, but gagged and vomited it back up.

  Hoang ignored the offering and once more closed his eyes.

  As she’d watched him from where they had placed her, three meters in front of him, Wey Chen once more could only guess at what he might be thinking.

  But from the all-seeing viewpoint of her dream, she knew. Hoang imagined himself back in Beijing, doing rounds at the hospital, walking through the wards between neatly arranged rows of beds, the nurses greeting him with smiles as brilliant as his own crisp white coat. Patients eagerly hung on his every word, then tearfully thanked him for his slightest pronouncement. He’d told her that those were the sunniest days of his life, that he’d been the most promising young internist in the Department of Infectious Diseases. Then came the offer, luring him with incentives of cutting-edge technology and a chance to do clinical research with the best molecular biologists in China. She knew the allure. They’d promised the same in their efforts to recruit her.

  During those last moments, she’d riveted her gaze on him and seen that he never once flagged in keeping his eyes squeezed shut.

  In her dream he clung to the memory of strolling down that ward, between the lines of beds. The sunlight streamed sideways through the windows as it always did early in the morning, bathing everything in its glow
and bestowing a healthy radiance on even the sickest of faces.

  “Morning, Doctor,” the nurses said, beaming with respect.

  “Morning,” he murmured, swallowing hard, as he heard a click by his ear.

  Chapter 15

  The next day, Friday, January 23, 2009, 6: 01 A.M. EST

  Denny’s Restaurant, Watertown, Upstate New York

  Yuri sat hunched over a cup of coffee in a booth facing the front door, his head turtled into the up-turned collar of his coat. Aromas of fried bacon, sausages, and eggs wafted around him, along with the swirls of friendly chatter from the other diners. Tiffany lamps cast a warm, golden hue over the tables and counter, while the blues, yellows, reds, and greens from leftover Christmas lights cheered up the dark corners.

  Outside, it wasn’t nearly so hospitable. The night pasted itself against the windows like paint, and the blizzard that had dogged him the whole drive seemed to have pounced full force the minute he’d arrived.

  His attention remained fixed on those nearest him. Mostly truckers and snowplow drivers, he figured, judging by their rigs in the parking lot. Among them, the regulars and locals stood out, greeting the waitresses by name. He focused on those similar to himself, the outsiders who sat alone and didn’t talk to anyone. There were no Asians, but again, that gave him little comfort. He was now certain that, after missing him the first time, whoever made the second try would be an assassin with less obvious credentials.

  He wasn’t alone in scanning the crowd. Everybody, it seemed, was keeping an eye on everybody else, wariness having become l’ordre du jour as they’d said on the Montreal radio stations that he had tuned into along the way. All broadcasters, American and Canadian, were warning of stranger-on-stranger attacks.

  His own biggest risk probably lay in being spotted by a sharp-eyed citizen who’d seen his image on TV.

  He sipped the much needed coffee, and stretched his back, arching it against the firm green seat, trying to rid himself of the stiffness that came with driving all night.

  He took one last look around. Seeing no one eyeing him any more suspiciously than they eyed anyone else, he walked over to a pay phone near the entrance, fed it five quarters, and dialed a 613 number on the Canadian side.

  “Yeah!” a man answered, picking up only after a half-dozen rings. The word came out slurred and thick with sleep.

  But Yuri recognized the voice and said, “Anastasia,” the old code name.

  “Forty-five minutes,” the person on the other end of the line snapped, instantly alert, his familiar Russian accent as identifiable as a fingerprint.

  Relief swept through Yuri. Boris’s pipeline still existed, the usual contact as ready as ever to pick him up. Maybe the guy didn’t even know Boris was dead.

  To reach the rendezvous point from here might take thirty minutes, maybe a bit more with the storm. And this time of year, there would be just a hint of first light, gray enough to see by, but too dark to be spotted.

  Perfect. And he had five minutes for another coffee.

  He returned to his booth, signaling his waitress.

  Smiling, she swept down on him, carrying a steaming pot fresh off the maker. “Will you want breakfast with this?” she asked, full of eagerness to please. Her striped uniform provided a lined sketch of the curves beneath the cloth.

  Definitely she had something more than caffeine to offer. At another time he might have followed up on it, and was about to bestow his never-fail, most fetching grin on her anyway, just for fun, when she added, “Sir.”

  The kind of “Sir” that kids used to address a teacher, or an elder, or some visiting, old fogey friend of their parents.

  His grin came out stillborn. “No. I’m in a hurry,” he replied.

  She filled his cup from the brimming pot--a little shakily, he noticed, probably from the weight of it--then took her smile to the next customer.

  Yuri downed the hot drink in several gulps and got to his feet, ready to leave. At least she hadn’t offered him the high-fiber special, he was thinking, when a car with cop lights and a state trooper insignia pulled into the parking lot.

  It came to a stop under the amber glow of the restaurant’s neon sign. Two uniformed policemen got out and walked toward the entrance. Then one of them spotted the four-wheel-drive Lexus SUV, paused, said something to his partner, and walked back to their car.

  The partner went to the hind end of the Lexus and wiped snow off the license plate.

  Yuri knew he’d taken a chance driving his own car. But he hadn’t hot-wired a vehicle in twenty years, not since the night he and Anna escaped from Sverdlovsk to make contact with the American Embassy. And that Lada sure as hell hadn’t been anything like modern vehicles with their state-of-the-art alarm systems. So he had taken the Lexus, but, using a screwdriver and pliers from his tool kit, switched license plates, twice, once for the drive out of New York City, the second time in a long-term parking lot at the train station in Albany. On both occasions he’d found another Lexus SUV. Wrong color, wrong year, and the ruse wouldn’t hold up if someone pulled him over to check his own driver’s license or registration, but with a layer of slush having overcoated his red paint job in a grimy brown, any cop following behind who ran a check on the number might be fooled.

  The man who’d inspected the license plate returned to the police car. The first cop had already slid back into the driver’s seat, his face bathed in a blue flickering light coming from somewhere below the dashboard.

  Onboard computer, Yuri thought, and felt the coffee he’d just drunk curdle to an icy sludge in his stomach.

  He stepped out of his booth, threw down an Abraham Lincoln, and approached his young waitress. “Where’s the washroom, my dear?” he said in his most polished American accent and this time flashed his best grin full force.

  “Through the back, sir,” she said, offering yet another of her own brilliant smiles.

  We could be a damn toothpaste ad, Yuri thought. He walked briskly between a row of unoccupied booths to the hallway entrance that she’d indicated, only to find himself in a cul-de-sac of three doors. The first bore a pictograph of a man, the second had one of a woman, and the third carried a photo of a wheelchair. But there was no exit.

  He went into the men’s.

  No window.

  Same for the handicapped facility.

  The ladies’?

  He threw open the door, ready to put on a show of surprised confusion if a startled female screamed.

  Empty.

  But again, no window.

  He strode back into the restaurant proper. A fire exit sign hung above the door leading to the kitchen, but running out there would attract too much attention.

  He glanced through the front window.

  In the darkness he saw one of the cops had walked over to the Lexus again, this time to wipe a swath with his glove through the grime, revealing the red surface beneath.

  They’d made the color.

  Both cops looked toward the front window of the restaurant and surveyed the people in the booths.

  Yuri, standing well out of their line of sight as long as they kept their attention fixed where it was, scurried over to the pay phone. It was nicely recessed in a cubby hole where he wouldn’t be seen even when they entered the restaurant, at least not right away. He put in a couple of quarters and pretended to dial a number, all the time stealing glances toward the parking lot.

  Both policemen started toward the front door. The one who’d been at the computer carried a piece of paper.

  Yuri’s stomach seized into a cannon ball.

  He reached into his pocket and formed a fist around his keys, arranging them so that the longest ones on the ring protruded between his fingers, like blades.

  The two men pushed open the door.

  A gust of winter air flowed into the reception area.

  They continued to regard the booths beyond.

  Yuri once more turtled into his coat collar and continued to mimic having a quiet
conversation, all the while keeping an eye on the newcomers.

  “Hi, boys,” the young waitress said, and walked over to greet them. She held the steaming pot of coffee to one side and, shoulders back, increased the press of her breasts against the uniform. But Yuri noticed tiny ripples on the surface of the steaming brown liquid. She definitely had a subtle tremor in her right arm.

  “Hey, Julie,” the one with the piece of paper replied. His partner continued to scan the tables.

  “Will you be having the usual?” she asked, coming to a stop in front of the first man, nipples inches from his chest, her dark eyes deepening into black pools. “Two to go?”

  No doubt about her offering more than caffeine this time.

  “Not just yet,” he answered, and slipped his gaze past her, joining his partner in scrutinizing the customers.

  “My, aren’t we serious this morning,” Julie said, her smile lessening a notch. “And to think I was going to let you drive me home when I get off.”

  They ignored her.

  About three dozen men were scattered throughout the room. Yuri didn’t figure he resembled any of them.

  The two lawmen took their time, getting a good look at each face.

  Julie’s smile disappeared altogether. “You looking for someone?” she said, her voice now little more than a whisper, but it carried to Yuri.

  “Maybe,” the one with the paper said, holding it out to Julie. “Act naturally, but take a look at this photo and tell me if you’ve seen the guy.”

  She took it in her free hand. The paper shook, barely more than a little quiver, but Yuri caught it.

  The two cops didn’t seem to notice.

  Even Julie didn’t pay it any mind.

  But Yuri did. After having listened to radio bulletins all the way up from New York about the new mystery disease, he stared at her forelimbs with grim fascination. Poor kid, he thought, then hung up the phone and started toward the door.