Authors: Michael Palmer
“I knew one of the women on that list of his.”
Stallings nodded. “That’s why I kept signaling you to stop. Kevin, these people mean business. We were on our way back to the city when I asked Lancelot what would happen if I decided not to participate in this program. He said that he really didn’t believe anything would happen. He explained that only one knight had ever refused to participate—Sir Lionel. That was about a year ago. But before The Roundtable could decide whether or not he’d be allowed to continue with them, he got some sort of food poisoning and died.”
“Oh, God,” Kevin groaned. “I know all about that guy. When he died, his company lost its seat on The Roundtable completely. In fact, it was probably given to you. My boss used him to illustrate what I would cost our company and myself if I was ever removed and not replaced. But Jim, Lionel didn’t die from food poisoning. It was from a coronary
after
the food poisoning. He died in the hospital, just like …”
“Go ahead, say it. Just like Evelyn DellaRosa and heaven only knows how many other patients with expensive diseases.”
Kevin felt ill.
“Did Lancelot make it sound like Lionel’s death was something they engineered? I mean, did he say it like a threat?”
“I don’t know for sure. He’s got this smile that’s impossible to read.”
Kevin nodded. He’d had the same response to Pat Harper.
“Well, he just kept smiling through the whole Lionel story. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it gave me the creeps. I didn’t know what to say to him.”
“So how was it left?”
Stallings looked away again.
“I have until tomorrow night to come up with the first set of names and transfer the funds.”
“Oh, no. And who gets the money? The knights? The guy who … who does it?”
“I don’t know. But if you multiply my two or three clients by two or three for each of the others, that’s a hell of a lot of money.”
“And every one of those people just … dies?”
“They’re all pretty sick. And there are so many hospitals and patients in the city that apparently no one really thinks about there being anything out of the ordinary going on.… Loomis, what are we going to do?”
“Listen, maybe the whole thing is just some sort of loyalty test,” Kevin offered desperately.
“You know you don’t believe that.”
“Jim, I don’t know anything. Why couldn’t you just blow the whistle?”
“On what? On who? I have no proof of anything. Not even the name of a single patient. Besides, if The Roundtable does get exposed, I go down along with the rest of you. What about my family, my kids?”
“Well, what then? Show up at the meeting and just beg them to stop?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“What about Sir Lionel and his food poisoning?”
“That’s why I decided to chance sharing all this with you. If there are two of us, I think as long as we stick together, we might be able to convince the rest of them to stop.”
“I need to think about this.”
“Just don’t take too long. I only have until tomorrow to give them the names and … and I don’t think I can
do it.” He checked the time. “Listen, I’m due back at the office in a few minutes. Please, Loomis, please. Don’t say a word to anyone until we talk again. Okay?”
“I promise.”
“Not to your boss, not to your wife, not to anyone.”
Stallings was genuinely terrified. And if he was right about The Roundtable, Kevin had no trouble understanding why.
“I’ll call you before tomorrow night,” Stallings said. They exchanged business cards, and each wrote his home phone number on the back. “And Kevin, please wait five or ten minutes after I go before you start back.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
Sir Gawaine took his briefcase and headed off toward the subway station. Kevin stood there, numb and unseeing, his mind unwilling to sort through what had just been shared with him, except to acknowledge that if the situation was as Stallings believed, the possibilities open to them were all unacceptable.
“Mister! Hey, mister!”
Kevin turned, startled. Two youths in shorts and Yankee caps stood on the sidewalk. They looked about ten—his son Nicky’s age. Each wore a baseball glove.
“Yes, what is it?”
“Our ball, mister. It’s right by your foot. Could you throw it to us?”
Kevin picked up the scuffed, grass-stained hardball and tossed it back. The taller of the two boys snagged it easily, in a way Kevin had watched Nicky catch a thousand of his throws.
“Thanks, mister,” the youth called. “Nice arm. Nice arm.”
The night was warm and extremely muggy—the sort of night that invariably brought out the most vivid versions of the dream. He lay facedown on a sheet that was already drenched. His fists were tightly clenched and every muscle in his body was taut. At some level, he knew that it was all in his past, that he was only reliving the hideous experience in his mind.
But as always, he was powerless to wake himself.
“… 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 becomes desert dry. The pounding within his chest is so forceful that he feels certain The Doctor can see it.
Please don’t do this
, he screams silently.
Please
…
Perchek’s thumb tightens on the plunger.
“I think we’ll start with something modest,” he says, “equivalent, perhaps, to nothing more than a little cool breeze over the cavities in your teeth. Our interest is in the identities of the Mexican undercover agents, Mr. Santana. Mr. Orsino will write down any names you choose to give. And I should warn you. Some of the names we wish you to give us we already know. It would be most unpleasant for you should we catch you attempting any sort of stall or deception.”
“Go fuck yourselves. How’s that for a stall or deception?”
The Doctor merely smiles.
The last voice Ray hears before the injection is Joe Dash’s.
There are three ways a man can choose to handle dying
.…
The plunger of the syringe is depressed just a bit.
In less than half a minute, Ray experiences a mild vibration throughout his body, as if a low-grade electric current has been turned on. His scalp tightens. The muscles in his face twitch. He rubs his fingertips together, trying to rid them of an unpleasant numbness. Perchek, meanwhile, has taken a handheld stopwatch from his valise.
“I would expect that minuscule dose to last one minute and twenty seconds,” he says. “Higher doses persist somewhat longer. Although in this business, for you, time will become quite relative. A few seconds will seem like an hour. A minute like a lifetime. Have you some names for us?”
“Cary Grant, Mick Jagger, Marilyn Monroe …”
Perchek shrugs and depresses the plunger once more. The sensation doubles in intensity and quadruples in unpleasantness. This time, the pain is more burning than electric. Hot knives cut into Ray’s hands and feet, into his abdomen, groin, and lower back. Sweat bathes him with the
suddenness of a summer thunderstorm, stinging his eyes, soaking his T-shirt.
“Just a slightly higher dose and we’ll hold it at that level for a while,” Perchek says, checking Ray’s blood pressure and pulse. “We’re in no particular hurry, are we, Mr. Orsino?”
From outside, above and just beyond the walls of the chamber, Ray can hear the revelry of the Fiesta de Nogales. The fireworks and the music. The noisy celebration will go on throughout the night. It is doubtful he will be alive by the time it ends.
The Doctor is right. For Santana, the hour that follows is an eternity. Twice he nearly passes out from the pain. Each time, Perchek uses a shot of some sort and an increase in the IV infusion to bring him around for the next series of injections. Ray becomes used to the sound of his own screaming. Somewhere along the way he wets himself. In between injections, his muscles now continue to spasm uncontrollably. Several times he groans out names. Perchek glances over at Orsino, who shakes his head. Ray’s punishment for lying is an increase in the dosage. His response, more screaming.
…
Three ways a man can handle dying … three ways … three ways, … three ways
…
His head lolls back. His vision blurs. Staring at the light from the bare bulb overhead no longer bothers his eyes. It is as if the hideous pain has dulled his sight Sweat continues pouring from his body. His nervous system is shattered, his mind ready to snap. He has to give them a name they can verify—something, anything to stop Perchek’s chemical onslaught, even for a little while. He has done his best to drag out Joe Dash’s first two stages. Now, his resistance is gone. He has to give them something that will stop the pain.
“You bastard!” he screeches as the dose is increased once more. “You fucking bastard! Okay. Okay. No more. I’ll—”
He is cut short by the tunnel door behind him scraping
open. Through a dense haze, he hears a man’s breathless voice.
“Anton, there are government troops outside!” the man exclaims in perfect English. “Dozens of them. I think they have Alacante. U.S. agents just raided the Arizona house, too. The tunnel entrance is still closed, but it’s only a matter of time before they find it. They’re after you, Anton. I don’t know how they found out, but they know you’re here.”
The voice
. Ray strains to pull together the floating fragments of his thoughts. He knows the voice.
“Orsino, is there another way out of here?” Perchek asks.
“Through that door, Doctor. There’s a short tunnel to a house across the street. Alacante had it built.”
“Listen,” the voice says, “I’ve got to get back before they find the main tunnel and me in it.”
“I am grateful for the warning, my friend.”
“You know how to reach me if there’s anything I can do.”
The tunnel door scrapes shut. There are a few seconds of echoing footsteps, then silence. But in those moments, Ray’s clouded mind locks in on the voice.
Sean Garvey!
“Garvey, you bastard! … You son of a bitch!” he shrieks, remembering the moment he and his boss had been hauled off by Alacante’s men.
The signs that something was rotten with Garvey had been there a dozen times over,
he thinks now.
How careless it had been not to have picked up on them. How stupid
.
“Mr. Santana, it appears our business must come to a premature closure,” Perchek says.
From somewhere on the floor above them comes the sound of a door being smashed in. Then there is gunfire.
“Doctor, I think we should go,” Orsino says.
“You are right, Mr. Orsino,” Perchek replies. “But only up to a point.”
His back turned, he reaches into his valise. When he turns back, he is holding a snub-nosed revolver. Before
Orsino can react, he is shot through the bull’s-eye that is his half mouth. His head snaps back. He spins full-circle in a graceless pirouette, then crumples to the dusty floor.
The shooting upstairs has stopped. The footsteps are closer now, and they can hear voices. The Doctor levels the automatic at the center of Santana’s forehead. Ray clenches his teeth and forces his eyes to remain open for the last moment he will ever see anything. Then, with the smile Ray has come both to fear and loathe, Perchek lowers the revolver, steps forward, and empties the still nearly full syringe into the intravenous line.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You should die from this dose long before it has its full effect.”
He whirls, steps over Orsino’s corpse, and hurries toward the escape tunnel.
“Garvey!
“ Santana screams, his final fury fixed not on the madman, but on the friend who has betrayed him.
“Garvey, you’ll rot in hell for this!”
A moment later his nervous system explodes in a volcano of pain. He shrieks again and again. He thrashes his head about. He bites through his lip and hurls himself sideways onto the floor. The agony, in every nerve, every fiber of his body, intensifies.
“Garveeeey!”
Soaked in sweat, Walter Concepcion sat bolt upright in bed. After more than seven years, he had almost become inured to the nightmare. But some journeys back to the basement sessions with The Doctor were still worse than others. And this one—his first in the weeks since arriving in Manhattan from his home in Tennessee—had been a motherfucker.
It was the pain that had brought on the flashback. It usually was. The electric nerve pain that had been part of his life for almost every moment of the seven years since The Doctor emptied the syringe into his body. Ray wiped off his forehead and face with the sheet and fumbled through the bedside table drawer for the Bible he had hollowed
out to hold his Percodans. He could stand to have everything he owned in the rented room ripped off, even his gun. But not his Percodans. His doc at home understood. After years of neurologic consultations, psychotherapy, AA, NA, and hospitalizations, the man had given up trying for a cure, and now just wrote the scripts. The local pharmacist understood, too, and just filled them. To those men and the others who knew the whole story, Ray was a legend. The man who had captured Anton Perchek.
Santana had brought along enough pills to last a month, provided the chronic pain didn’t get any worse than it had been. He had no desire to take to the streets for drugs, but he would if he had to. Anton Perchek was alive and plying his miserable trade in New York. And there was no way Ray was leaving the city until the man was dead.
He had heard from Harry about the successful session with the hypnotist. Next, Maura would be meeting with the criminologist her brother knew. Together, they would make computer renderings of her drawing in a variety of disguises. Those drawings would be put up in hospitals throughout the city. Santana’s plan was simple. Keep jabbing at The Doctor. Irritate him enough, and sooner or later, he would do something rash. Sooner or later, he would make a mistake.