Lethal Treatment

by S A Gardner

  Damian exuded calm now, in his element, a true killing machine. In two minutes I counted twenty-nine down. Dead?

  Of course.

  The highest ranks were in the two middle vehicles. They hadn’t come out. I could picture them screaming in their radios for backup. Would they be less scared if they knew we wanted them alive?

  Nah. They’d probably envy those we’d considered immediately expendable their quick demise. I tried to summon my guilt about terminating lives, no matter whose.

  I got negligible stirrings. There was this issue of nine thousand snuffed refugees tampering with my mercy threshold.

  The high ranks still clung to the sanctuary of their bulletproof vehicles. Time to give them a new perspective on their current safety levels.

  A few pipe bombs and four detonated vehicles later, they were running out, yelling surrender. Damian’s shouted orders had them promptly dropping their weapons and lying face down on the ground.

  We came out of hiding, me, Matt, Damian and Ed, with Suz and José holding their stations. Damian covered the prone militants for us while we got our stuff out.

  As soon as the first two felt our needles jab their necks they instinctively struggled. Damian kicked them unconscious. It convinced the others to take the injected sedative alternative.

  As I moved to the more insidious part of my plan, Damian exposed the militants for me, careful to let me see only part of the buttocks I was injecting.

  A giggle burst out of me. “Protecting the little lady’s modesty? Lest the sight of the genitals of the men she’s killing soil her sensibilities, huh? The genitals she’ll be examining thoroughly in a couple of hours if all goes to plan?” Damian’s glare was one for the books. “Just some comic relief before you burst.” His gesture shouted for me to shut up. “Oh, they can’t hear me. And even if they can, they won’t be in any condition to tell on me. And it’s true what I just said.” I injected the first one with the haloperidol-based cascading cocktail we’d concocted. “That will give them, among far more scarier symptoms, priapism. That’s sustained painful erection.”

  Damian maneuvered my next victim for me, hissed in my ear, “Yeah, you like to give men that.”

  I almost choked on another chuckle. “Ah, his sense of macabre humor resurfaces.”

  Matt, who’d only heard the first part of the exchange, turned to his second victim that Ed had prepped for him. “Bet an agonizing hard on will spook their underlings more than the rest of the neuroleptic malignant syndrome.”

  “That’s a life-threatening derangement that affects multiple organ systems,” I explained. “Shooting fever, lead-pipe-like rigidity, severe tremors, stampeding heart, off-the-chart hypertension, incontinence, hallucinations…”

  Damian huffed a dark laugh. “Merciless terminator here feeling decidedly humane.”

  He’d once said that a healer made the best killer. No point arguing against it. Not when he was right.

  I was doing this, no pulling punches allowed. There was everything to lose if I didn’t go all out to scare the hell out of these monsters’ cronies.

  Speaking of which, more confusion to the enemy was in order.

  I turned to Matt. “How about we change the MO?”

  “Give the other four a different set of symptoms?” Matt caught on at once. “Yeah, let’s. What do you have in mind?”

  “Toluene,” I said and he grunted his approval as I produced glue tubes and tossed him a few.

  “You’re making them sniff glue?” Ed asked incredulously.

  “We’re feeding it to them actually.” Matt answered him, handed me a nasogastric tube and proceeded to shove his down one militant’s throat.

  “A lot of drugs have overlapping symptoms with haloperidol in toxic doses, and therefore similar antidotes.” I explained my change of strategy as I injected the glue down the nasogastric tube. “Not so toluene. I’m counting on the contradictory clinical pictures to further stymie treatment efforts. These guys won’t even experience the first rush of euphoria that glue sniffers go for. Ingesting the glue will bypass the good part and go immediately to the bad, when it crosses the blood-brain barrier in about an hour. Cardiac arrhythmias, severe chest pain, seizures, vomiting blood…” I paused, looked at Damian. “I’m scaring you, aren’t I?”

  “You always scare me, Calista.” He made it sound like the most refined form of praise, feel like the most intimate caress he’d ever given me.

  The familiar surge of longing almost made me forget he’d been lying to me, apparently from the beginning. Almost.

  I beat it back, continued to work.

  Two minutes later, our insidious poisons delivered, Damian and Ed completed the picture the backups would encounter. They shot the leaders, causing wounds that would let them linger until they were taken to the base, but would complicate their clinical picture. After installing emergency measures, the doctors wouldn’t know what else to do for them, forcing the militants to come to us for help.

  And the final act of our mission would be set in motion.

  Forty-Two

  An hour after arriving back in the camp, the militants came for us, as planned.

  After conferring with Damian, he ran to us, pretending to relay the situation. We in turn pretended to debate as the militants fidgeted. Damian went back to them with our needs, which they eagerly agreed to. We could have anything, bring anyone and everything along. And, according to plan, we did.

  Two hours later after a trip through the roundabout route they were forced to reveal to us, here we were, welcomed into the militant base like the saviors they thought we were.

  “The doctors will examine the casualties first,” Damian said to the militant in charge at the moment. “Then decide if they need to transfer them to our surgery trailer.”

  The man nodded, ran ahead of us, showing us the way.

  Jake hadn’t been exaggerating. This place was a five-star facility. That emergency room we burst into was as polished and as equipped as any I’d ever seen in a GCA hospital.

  And there lay the men I’d personally poisoned hours ago.

  I noticed everything at once.

  Meticulous emergency measures had been applied. Wounds wrapped in pressure bandages, fluid replacement underway as well as breathing support with positive pressure ventilation, with nasogastric tubes decompressing the stomach, and draining blood from the four with toluene poisoning. They were all hooked to cardiac monitors and pulse oximeters and sedated to control pain, hallucinations and seizures.

  That had to be Jake’s work. Doing enough to make it look he’d done all he could, but not addressing their real problems in the least.

  Good. I’d actually worried he’d get overzealous and go all out to save them, no matter what was at stake.

  My team flitted between the casualties, pretending to give the pseudo-exam all we had. We finally converged and put our heads together, exchanging huge medical terms at the height of apprehension.

  Then Damian turned to the militants with our agreed on scenario. “Did they have contact with enemies within the last forty-eight hours? They’ve been dosed with slow-acting poisons.”

  From a conversation with Jake, I’d found out that those leaders had been meeting ones from a rival faction, to negotiate a merger. This had fit perfectly in my plan. Any suspicion could be easily directed toward their competition.

  Sure enough, the man currently in charge nodded vigorously, swore explosively. He reached the conclusion we wanted him to, filling in the spaces of the ambush.

  Damian seamlessly pretended concern and sympathy, squeezed his shoulder. “The good news is the doctors have antidotes back in their trailers. But they also need huge amounts of blood, to exchange all of the patients’.”

  I intervened, more confident now of my Russian. “I need my nurses to test everyone in the base for compatible blood donations. The patients all need emergency surgery, but we can operate only on two at a time. Which two do you prioritize?”

 
The man blinked at me. “The two most in danger?”

  I shook my head. “They’re all in equal danger. What I meant was, who are the ones you can’t afford to lose?”

  The man started. Seemed he thought the angels of mercy we were never thought in such a heartless way. But I was putting him on the spot. Those eight were commanders of equal status. He couldn’t pick.

  Because I knew he couldn’t, I could say this and make it sound like his idea. “If we can’t prioritize, then we need help. Round up all the doctors you have in the facility.”

  The man gaped at me, as if I’d asked him to flap his arms and fly. “But there’s only Dr. Constantine.”

  What?

  All right. Breakdown of communication of the most profound kind in progress.

  I took a deep breath, tried again, picking the clearest words I could. “Sir, I don’t think you understood me. I need all the other medical personnel you have in the facility.”

  In answer, he spoke as clearly and slowly. “We don’t have any other medical personnel.”

  Before the artery I felt expanding behind my left eye burst, Damian thankfully intervened. He fired colloquial Russian at the man who burst out in an almost incomprehensible elaboration.

  Damian finally took me aside. “He’s insisting there’s no one here but Constantine. And they won’t bring him. You did your part, Calista. You got us inside. Now abide by the plan. Do what you would have done if all the hostages were brought here. Tell them you’ll take the leaders back to the surgery trailer and get out of here. I’ll take care of Constantine. And everything else.” He crushed my hand, his agitation scorching me to the bone. “Please, Calista.”

  I nodded slowly, and he inhaled as if he hadn’t been breathing at all till then. With a last fierce look, he turned and walked out with his team. I watched him disappear, numb, dumb.

  There was no one here. No hostages. No one but Jake.

  There was one thing even worse.

  Damian had known it all along.

  Forty-Three

  There was no hostages.

  And Damian had known. I just knew it.

  How long had he known? From the start? He’d lied to me, from day one, about everything concerning this mission?

  About everything, period?

  Not important now. What he’d done. What I didn’t understand. How it hurt. One thing mattered. He and his team were out there, implementing our plan…

  Which was what, exactly?

  What was our mission? If there were no hostages, what were we doing here in the first place?

  The same as we always intended.

  I whacked myself with the fierce thought.

  I was probably misinterpreting him again. He might have taken the absence of other hostages in his stride to focus on the part that counted now. Whether there was only Jake or a hundred others, our plan remained the same.

  I’d figure the rest out when we were all safely out of here. My team should be safe back in our trailers shortly, while Damian would get Jake out and bring the base down on top of everyone in it.

  If Damian wanted to get Jake out.

  Everything inside me came to a shrieking halt. I was taking my suspicions too far. Being crazy.

  But was I?

  I’d learned so much about Damian on this mission. Not from what he’d told me, but from observation and the benefit of maturity and the years apart. He was what I hadn’t even suspected when he’d been my mentor and maker. A master actor and manipulator. The man I’d always thought a black or white entity had more shades and faces than I could imagine.

  But all inconsistencies and omissions aside, what I could still explain away, there was one thing that chilled me to the marrow. The way he’d said one thing.

  I’ll take care of Constantine.

  Okay. Seemed the shocks I’d sustained during this mission had finally shattered something inside me. I was being crazy. To think those preposterous things about Damian.

  A surge of anger frothed inside me, at him, for infecting me with this uncertainty, tormenting me with those suspicions.

  He’d forced me to allow for anything. Though it felt like a bullet to the gut, I couldn’t count on him. Not in this.

  I had to get Jake out myself.

  “Doctor, you must start the surgeries at once,” the man demanded. The man I might have to kill in minutes.

  Had to give peaceful measures a try first. I only had Damian’s word that they refused to get Jake. A word I would have staked my life on up till ten minutes ago. I was no longer certain I could stake ten cents on it.

  I turned to the man. “I’m afraid to move them.”

  He gave me an oh-God-she’s-stupid look. “Then do it here? Use Dr. Constantine’s things. They’re good.”

  “His…things are not what I’m used to. You must get him here to help me.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t get him for you.”

  Which makes you redundant.

  It was down to getting Jake the hard way. I’d try to be “humane” about it first.

  “Give me a minute with my team, to distribute chores.”

  I beckoned and we gathered around one of our victims.

  “Change of plan,” I said. “You go back to the STS. I’ll go fetch Jake myself.”

  Megumi’s eyes widened. “Why? Damian said he’d get him.”

  To explain why I couldn’t depend on Damian to do that, I had to tell them of his duplicity.

  I still couldn’t bring myself to expose him. Had to give them another explanation that would make sense to them.

  “With only one hostage to free, and a hive of terrorists ripe for the picking, which would you handle first if you were a self-respecting antiterrorist agent?”

  Ayesha nodded. “Yeah, I see what you mean. But how will you explain not joining us? Our head surgeon?”

  “I’ll say I need to work on the most serious case here.”

  Matt quirked his eyebrow at me. “You think we’ll leave you here facing hundreds of militants alone and go wait in safety and for news of your demise?”

  “I’m not about to provoke a confrontation,” I protested.

  Ishmael shrugged. “There will be one. Together we stand a chance.”

  “Jake is my concern,” I insisted. “Your role is over.”

  Ayesha snorted. “You’re saying this to the people who came here to face death daily for eight people we don’t know? Who as it turns out, don’t exist, not around here, anyway? What do you think we’d do for Dr. Constantine, who we do know now? For you?”

  God, I loved these guys. “You’re all crazy, you know that?”

  “Why else are we your friends and partners?” Megumi smirked. “So what do you need us to do?”

  I outlined my new plan. It was very simple. What Damian would call a crazy trick that was sure to end in disaster.

  Not that I cared what Damian thought or said anymore. I wasn’t leaving Jake to his now very questionable priorities. I was pulling it off. Seemed it was fine by my team, too.

  As Lucia and Megumi released the gurneys’ brakes and the others got our prepared syringes out, I turned to the man.

  “Before anything, we need blood samples from you.”

  Resentment rose off him. He really would rather let his superiors die. But he knew he’d be out of a lucrative business without the ones controlling the inflow of cash.

  Grudgingly, he nodded to the other men who rolled up their sleeves. We had sixteen militants here. Two each. Sedate eight and we’d have an easier time dealing with the rest.

  I kept them answering questions so they wouldn’t notice we were injecting them with something before we drew blood. I injected my militant, no problem.

  Then it all went wrong.

  The day leader realized we were up to something. In a split second, his bellow broke over me like a thunderclap, ordering his men to attack.

  It was damned inconvenient and premature, but we were always ready for worst-case scenarios.


  Half the team held the groggy militants as shields, while the others rammed the others with the gurneys. Roars echoed along with gunfire as the comatose leaders catapulted in the air, impacting them.

  Everything slowed down as everything inside me streaked. The leader filled my focus, his red face distorting with hatred and rage, his gun materializing in his hand already discharging, straight at my heart.

  No way. This wasn’t how I’d go.

  I darted out of range, heard Megumi’s yelp, felt her go down behind me.

  No.

  Stress hormones gushed in my system, pouring speed and skill and viciousness into my limbs. One mawashi geri roundhouse kick snapped his wrist, the sensation of shattering bones transmitting through my boot. Outraged agony burst from him, transformed into blind violence.

  He threw himself at me. A kin geri to the groin had him keeling over, trying to hurl himself after his gun. Not letting him touch ground, I rammed him in the chest, pinning him to the wall. His good hand snatched a gun from the man who was slammed beside him by Matt.

  Time stretched on his macabre smile, stilled on the rising gun. I wasn’t in position to kick it. But I was in position for much worse.

  I withdrew my leg, twisted, lashed it back full force in a yoko geri kekomi, a side thrust kick in his throat. I heard the crack this time.

  He fell to the ground like a sack of wet cement.

  I snatched the gun from his limp hand, somersaulted over him for the other one, snapped it up, rolled with both pointed to defend my team. Heard another muffled gunshot.

  Megumi. Her left arm covered in blood, she’d still managed to wrestle the gun from her militant, to shoot another who would have shot Aram. The rest each ended his or her own confrontation, Matt snapping his own adversary’s neck with his bare hands.

  “Hands over your heads,” I shouted at the remaining four men. “Take the injections or we’ll have to kill you all.”

  In a couple of minutes, we had all but one unconscious. Those would die in their sleep when Damian and his team detonated this place. We also had Megumi dosed up on painkillers and her shoulder wound securely bandaged.