Authors: Michael Palmer
As he neared the lot he began casting about for something he could use as a weapon. Subarsky was inches taller than he was, and perhaps seventy-five pounds heavier. Eric’s main advantage in any match with the man would be surprise—that and the mounting rage he was feeling for all he and Laura and so many others had been put through. The best his brief search could produce was an empty whiskey bottle. Still, it was something.
The lot was just ahead. It was cut into a tree- and brush-covered slope that paralleled the roadway, and was dimly lit only by a streetlamp diagonally across the road near the dock area. Eric crouched low and made his way to the edge of the trees. Through the persistent, driving rain, he could make out the two decaying trailer hulks, propped up on railroad ties at the far side of the lot. Otherwise, the place appeared deserted.
Cursing the situation, and trying to sort out what his next move should be, Eric slogged through the muddy puddles to the trailers. One had only a faded shield and the letters
D & E
painted on the side. The other, at least at one time, had been the property of the Aphrodite Moving and Storage Company. Both the trailers were rusted well beyond any practical use other than storage, perhaps.
The rear doors were gone from the D & E trailer, and its wooden floorboards were splintered and decaying. Even from several feet away and through the rain, Eric could smell the odor of stale urine coming from inside. The Aphrodite trailer, which was intact and in
much better shape, was secured with a bulky padlock. Eric hefted the surprisingly heavy hardware in his hand as he weighed the possibility that he was in the wrong place against the likelihood that he had somehow beaten Laura and Subarsky to the spot. There was, of course, a third option—that the two of them had already been and gone, but he refused to allow himself to consider that.
He checked beneath the trailer, searching for some sort of trapdoor, and was walking around to the front end when twin spears of headlight swung into the lot and stopped not twenty feet behind the trailer. Eric flattened himself against the side and inched along to his right until he was concealed from view. Even through the gloom he could discern the distinctive silhouette of a Saab 900 Turbo—Subarsky’s car.
Eric had been in the Saab, a year-old convertible, any number of times. Why had he never even wondered what a man constantly scrambling for research grants was doing with such elegant transportation?
He slipped around the railroad tie supports and ducked under the trailer. From that vantage, on his knees and elbows in the mud, he could make out only the lower half of the Saab. He wondered if Laura was inside. Five minutes passed with no movement from the car, and no sound other than the steady rumble of rain on the metal roof. Eric began to shiver from the inactivity. He grasped the neck of the whiskey bottle and was trying to formulate some sort of plan when the car door opened and closed. A man in a knee-length poncho stepped out into the downpour and approached the trailer. From his walk and the size of his boots, Eric could tell it was Dave.
Eric edged to his left, and was nearly out from beneath the trailer when he was transfixed by the beam of a powerful flashlight.
“Hey, amigo,” Subarsky called out down the full length of the trailer, “how nice of you to be here to welcome us.”
Eric shielded his eyes against the glare.
“Is Laura with you?” he shouted back.
“She is, yes. But when I caught sight of you scampering around as we pulled in, I decided that perhaps I might do well to truss her up a bit. I assume you know by now that you weren’t really supposed to be in any condition to get here.”
“Wheeler’s dead.”
“So your beautiful friend here told me. Nice going, buddy. Damn fine work. I told him outthinking you wasn’t going to be that easy, but he’s always been an arrogant son of a bitch. He was arrogant when he busted me for dealing at MIT. And then he was arrogant enough to suggest he become my business partner. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts he died arrogant too.”
“Give it up, Dave,” Eric said.
“Now that I don’t even have to split the profits with supercop? You can’t be serious. I wish I could consider taking you on in his place. Caduceus and the Charity Project could still use a guy with your panache. But now I fear I just wouldn’t ever be able to trust you.”
“What’s the Charity Project?”
The beam of light went off. In the seconds it took for Eric’s eyes to adjust, it was shining on his face once again—this time from just a few feet away.
“It’s the key to the kingdom, that’s what,” Subarsky said. “DS-Nineteen—the drug that time and the fops in Washington forgot.”
“The DNA-bound antibiotic? I thought you gave up on that.”
“Oh, no, my friend. The shortsighted powers-that-be did. I always knew they were wrong, so I just stepped back and retooled. Put me together a quality team with vision, and set about making DS-Nineteen a reality. Now then, why don’t you just wriggle on out here and we’ll find someplace a little drier to continue our basic science seminar?”
Without hesitating, Eric swung the bottle as hard as he could. The glass exploded against the flash, shattering its lens and bulb and sending it flying out of Subarsky’s hand.
“Hey, nice move!” Subarsky cried. “But I thought you wanted to hear about my antibiotic.”
Eric had already spun around and scrambled out from under the trailer on the other side. He splashed back to the Saab. Laura, her mouth sealed beneath a broad piece of adhesive tape, stared out at him helplessly. She was lashed by her wrists to the steering wheel, and a single piece of rope across her throat pinned her back against the headrest. Eric was trying to kick in the passenger window when Subarsky stepped up beside him.
“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-enclosed plastic capsule. In seconds the heat from the wire coil had melted the plastic, releasing a single large drop of concentrated hydrochloric acid.