Authors: Michael Palmer
Ray’s knuckles blanched as he clutched the arm of the chair.
“My name is Perchek. Dr. Anton Perchek,” the man said.
Santana’s stomach tightened. Bile shot up into his throat. The name was a death sentence.
The Doctor
. Everyone in the agency—everyone in Washington—knew who Perchek was. But as far as Ray knew, no one had ever seen so much as a photograph of him.
“I can tell from your expression that my name is one you recognize,” Perchek said, favoring Ray with an enigmatic smile. “That’s good. That’s very good.”
Ray’s mouth had gone dry. Anton Perchek, M.D., Soviet-born and-trained, had long ago left his native country. Now, he belonged to no country and to every country. A true son of the world. For over the years, The Doctor had built a reputation for being the best in the world at what he did, which was to keep torture subjects alive, awake, and responsive. He was seldom without employment. Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Paraguay, Iraq, South Africa, Haiti—wherever there was conflict or political repression, there was a demand for his services. There were even rumors—unsubstantiated—that he did occasional jobs for the CIA. A U.S. federal grand jury had indicted Perchek in absentia for complicity in the deaths of several American undercover operatives, two of whom Ray knew well.
“So, Señor Santana,” he said, his Spanish unaccented but sterile. “Would you prefer I address you in English?” He waited for a response. Then he turned and noticed the adhesive tape pulled tightly across Ray’s mouth. He chuckled at his own oversight. “My apologies, Señor Santana. Señor Orsino?”
His half mouth twisted in what might have been a grin, Orsino stepped forward and viciously tore the tape off—first from across Ray’s face, then from under his chin.
“So,” Perchek asked again. “Spanish or English? What will it be?”
Ray flexed the tightness and spasm out of his jaw.
“Your Spanish is better than mine,” he said.
“I’ve been led to believe your Mexican Spanish is quite good, actually—especially for someone from the Bronx. But very well. English it will be.”
His English, with perhaps the slightest British tinge, was no less fluent than his Spanish. Ray suspected that the man could have conversed in any number of languages.
“I speak twelve others, actually,” he said, as if reading Santana’s mind. “Although my Arabic and Swahili may be getting a bit rusty.”
His average face smiled down at Ray. But in that moment, Ray noticed something that wasn’t the least bit average. It was the man’s eyes. The irises were as pale as any he had ever seen—almost translucent.
Ice blue
was the closest he could come to labeling them. In fact, ice blue was a near perfect description, for they were as hard and as cold as a human’s eyes could be.
“I don’t know what this is all about.” Ray forced out the words.
The ice blue eyes sparked. Otherwise, Perchek’s demeanor remained unchanged.
“Then we shall help you learn,” he said.
He handed Orsino a length of twine and motioned to the light fixture overhead. Once the twine was secured and dangling down, Perchek turned to his valise. He produced a plastic bottle of intravenous solution, connected it to a plastic infusion tube, and suspended it from the twine.
“Zero point nine percent sodium chloride,” he said, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. “Normal saline.”
He tightened a latex tourniquet just above Santana’s left elbow, waited a few seconds for the veins to distend, and then slipped in an intravenous catheter with the ease of one who had performed the maneuver hundreds of times. Next he wrapped a blood pressure cuff around the other arm and secured it in place.
“Listen to me,” Ray said, struggling for a tone of calm and reason. “Orsino, you’ve got to listen. I was setting up that Fed, Garvey. He was about to sell me some information on the new DEA strategy against Alacante.”
“You are lying,” Orsino said.
“No, it’s the truth.”
“We shall see what is the truth and what is not,” Perchek said, drawing up a slightly turbid solution into a large syringe. He inserted the long needle through a rubber port into the infusion tubing, and taped the syringe to Ray’s forearm. “We shall see very soon. Mr. Orsino?”
Orsino knelt, positioning himself so that his face was just a foot or so from Ray’s. Santana mentally recoiled from the man’s breath, heavy with the odor of cigarettes and garlic, and stared with revulsion at the yellowed half rows of teeth.
“Names,” Orsino said, a small bubble of spittle forming at the good side of his mouth. “The Mexican undercover agents. All of them.”
Ray looked past the man to where Perchek stood. He wondered what awaited him within the tattered valise. Truth serum, perhaps. Reputedly, Perchek usually left the dirty work to his employers. His job was to use his drugs to keep subjects alive and awake. But it seemed hard to believe the crass, slow-witted Orsino would have the patience and skill required to do an effective job of inflicting just the right increments of pain.
“I don’t know any of them, Orsino,” Ray said. “You’ve got to believe that.”
During his year of training with the agency, there were a number of classes the cadets had shared with their CIA counterparts. One of them was formally entitled Dealing with Hostile Interrogation. The trainees referred to it as Torture 101. The instructor, a former fighter pilot named Joe Dash, had spent four years in a Vietcong prison camp. He had no eyes.
“There are three things you must always believe when being hostilely interrogated,”
Dash stressed. He believed that there were always three points essential to any subject. Three—no more, no less.
“First, that anything you are promised in exchange for answers is bullshit. Second, that if you don’t give them what they want, they may decide to hold off killing you and try again another day. And third, and most
important, that as long as you are alive, there’s a chance you’ll be rescued.”
“We want those names,” Orsino said.
“I swear, I don’t know any of them. You’ve got to believe me.”
“There are three stages you should go through in responding to hostile interrogation. Each stage should be dragged out as long as humanly possible. First, deny knowing anything. And keep denying it. Next, admit that you know some things, but give them misinformation—especially if they’ll have to spend time verifying what you say. The longer it takes them to determine you’re lying, the better the chance that you’ll be rescued—take it from one who was. The third stage is telling them what they want to know. Whether you are forced to that stage or not depends a little on what you’re made of and a lot on how good your interrogators are.”
Orsino reached out a meaty hand and squeezed Ray’s cheeks so tightly their insides touched.
“I’m glad you didn’t tell us,” he rasped.
He stepped back. Immediately, Ray was transfixed by the ice blue eyes.
“Do you know any chemistry at all, Mr. Santana?” Perchek asked. “No matter. You may be interested to know the chemical name for the contents of that syringe. It is four-chloryl, four-hydroxy, trimethyl, six-fluorodimethyl carbamate. Actually, there are two chemical side chains as well, so the name is even longer.”
“I’m impressed,” Ray said.
“The short chemical name is hyconidol hydrochloride. A chemist friend did the synthesis, but my own research produced the concept.”
“Bravo.”
“You see, Mr. Santana, at the end of every pain nerve in the human body is a chemical transmitter that connects it with the next nerve and fires it off. The impulse shoots up that nerve, and another jet of transmitter connects it with the next. Et cetera, et cetera. Eventually—quite rapidly, actually—the message is transmitted from the point of injury to the pain center of the brain and … ouch!”
“Nicely put.”
Santana already knew where Perchek was heading. He was sure his understanding showed in his eyes.
“Hyconidol almost matches, atom for atom, the pain fiber neurotransmitter chemical. That means I can fire those nerves off all at once and at will. Every single one of them. Think of it, Mr. Santana. No injury … no mess … no blood. Just pain. Pure pain. Except in the work I do, hyconidol has absolutely no clinical value. But if we ever do market it, I thought an appropriate name for it might be Agonyl. It’s incredible stuff, if I do say so myself. A small injection? A little tingle. A larger one? Well, I’m sure you get the picture.”
Ray’s mouth had become desert dry. The pounding within his chest was so forceful that he felt certain The Doctor could see it.
Please don’t do this, he screamed silently. Please
…
Perchek’s thumb tightened on the plunger.
“I think we’ll start with something modest,” he said. “Equivalent, perhaps, to nothing more than a little cool breeze over the cavities in your teeth.”
The last voice Ray heard before the injection was Joe Dash’s.
There are three ways a man can choose to handle dying
.…
For twelve years, the Jade Dragon on the Upper West Side of Manhattan had prided itself on exceptional food at very reasonable prices. As a result, on an average weekday its 175-seat capacity turned over twice, and on weekends as many as five times. Tonight, a warm Friday in June, the wait for a table was half an hour.
Seated in his customary spot, Ron Farrell was commenting to his wife Susan and their friends Jack and Anita Harmon on how the place had grown since he and Susan had first eaten there almost a decade ago. Now, although they had moved three times, they made a point of coming to the Jade Dragon alone or with friends every other Friday, almost like clockwork.
They were nearly done with a meal that the Harmons had proclaimed as good as any Chinese food they had ever eaten when Ron stopped in mid-sentence and began rubbing his abdomen. With no warning, severe cramps had begun knotting his gut, accompanied almost immediately by waves of nausea. He felt sweat break out beneath his arms and over his face. His vision blurred.
“Ronnie? Are you all right?” his wife asked.
Farrell took several slow, deep breaths. He had always handled pain well. But this ache seemed to be worsening.
“I don’t feel well,” he managed. “I’ve … I’ve just gotten this pain, right here.”
“It couldn’t be what you ate,” Susan said. “We all shared the same—”
Susan’s face suddenly went ashen. Beads of perspiration sprang out across her forehead. Then, without another word, she lurched sideways and vomited on the floor.
Standing by the kitchen door of the crowded restaurant, the young assistant chef watched the commotion grow as one by one, the four customers at table 11 became violently ill. Finally, he reentered the massive kitchen and made his way nonchalantly to the pay phone installed for the use of the hired help. The number he dialed was handwritten on a three-by-five file card.
“Yes?” the man’s voice at the other end said.
“Xia Wei Zen here.”
“Yes?”
The chef read carefully the words printed on the card.
“There are four leaves on the clover.”
“Very good. You know where to go after your shift. The man in the black car will take the empty vial from you in exchange for the rest of what you are now owed.”
The man hung up without waiting for a reply.
Xia Wei Zen glanced about to ensure no one was watching, and then returned to his station. Work would not be nearly so taxing for the rest of his shift. For one thing, there was a good deal of money awaiting him. And for another, there would be many fewer orders coming in from the dining room tonight.
The call came into the emergency room of Good Samaritan Hospital at 9:47. Four Priority Two patients were being transported by rescue squad from a Chinese restaurant twenty blocks away. Preliminary diagnosis was acute food poisoning.
Priority Two
. Potentially serious illness or injury, non-life-threatening at the moment.
It was a typically busy Friday night. The nurses and residents of the large teaching hospital were already three
hours behind The twenty available treatment rooms were full, as was the waiting room. The air was heavy with the odors of perspiration, antiseptic, and blood. All around were the sounds of illness, misery, and pain—moans, babies crying, uncontrollable coughing.
“Ever eat at a place called the Jade Dragon?” the nurse who took the call from the rescue squad asked.
“I think so,” the charge nurse answered.
“Well, next time you might want to consider Italian. One rescue is on the way in with two probable food poisonings. Two more will be leaving shortly. Altogether, two men, two women, all in their forties, all on IVs, all vomiting.”
“Vital signs?”
“The numbers are okay for the moment. But according to the crew on the scene, none of them are looking all that good.”
“Fun and games times four.”
“Where do you want them?”
“What do we have?”
“Seven can be cleared if you can talk Dr. Grateful Dead, or whatever the hell his name is, into writing a few prescriptions.”
“Perfect. Put whoever looks worst in there and the rest in the hall. We’ll move them into rooms as we can. Might as well order routine labs and an EKG on each of them, too.”
“Chop chop.”
Ron Farrell grunted in pain as his litter was set on the emergency bay platform and telescoped up into transport position. He was on his side in a fetal position. The pain boring into his stomach was unremitting. Jack Harmon, who had quickly become even sicker than Susan, had been transported in the ambulance with him. Now, Ron saw him wave weakly as the two of them were wheeled through the automatic doors and into the commotion and fluorescent glare of the intake area.
The minutes that followed were a blur of questions, needles, spasms of pain, and examinations from people dressed in surgical scrubs. Ron was wheeled to a small room with open shelves of supplies and a suction bottle on the wall. The staff had addressed him courteously enough, but it was clear that everyone was harried. Ron’s personal physician wasn’t affiliated with Good Samaritan, as far as he knew. There was really nothing he could think of to do except wait for the medication he had been promised to take the pain away.