Extreme Measures (53 page)

Subarsky was dramatically humming a fragment of Bach’s Concerto No. 2 in E, and gently jiggling the key, when the hydrochloric acid first touched the wad of chemically treated plastique explosive wadded into the base of the lock. He was bending over, peering at the keyhole, when the apparatus exploded.

Eric watched in stunned horror as, in an instant, both of Subarsky’s hands and a good portion of his face were blown away. Bellowing insanely, pawing at the remains of his eyes, he stumbled backward. He was still on his feet after absorbing a blast powerful enough to have actually blown a large hole in the metal door.

Eric rolled over in time to see Subarsky, still shrieking incoherently, reel blindly past the Saab and onto Meridian Avenue. The driver of the oncoming sixteen-wheeler, high on cocaine he had bought from a dealer in Cambridge, never saw the figure lurch out of the shadows and onto the road; nor did he feel the impact when the reinforced steel grille-guard of the truck slammed into the man full force.

What remained of the genius biochemist’s right arm became entangled in the metal grate as the semi roared on through the rain. The young driver, immersed in a Guns and Roses tape, sang along as he drove, unaware of the huge, grotesque ornament suspended just below the Mack bull dog on his hood.

Fighting the rain and a sudden profound exhaustion, Eric took nearly fifteen minutes to work free of his bonds. Then, using a rock, he smashed in the passenger window of the Saab. A minute later, he and Laura were inside the trailer. The video receiver was on a crate in the front left corner. It was enclosed in an
oilskin sack, and its wire antenna had been brought out through a tiny hole drilled in the trailer wall.

“Here,” Eric said, handing the tape over. “I think you should be the one to turn this in.”

“That lock was the second time today that Scott’s saved my life,” Laura said.

They huddled together in the trailer as she told him about finding her brother, their subsequent capture and escape, and Scott’s death. She had eluded Lester Wheeler and his men by swimming underwater from one pier to the next. Finally, nearly unconscious from the cold, she had stumbled up the bank and onto the roadway. An elderly woman and her husband, on their way home from the market, had picked her up and brought her to their home.

“I’ve got a bit of a story to tell you, too,” Eric said, “but unless I get some dry clothes on soon, I may end up getting pneumonia and being taken to White Memorial Hospital. And we all know what happens to people who are brought there.”

“Not anymore it doesn’t,” Laura said. She jumped off the trailer and helped him to follow.

T
he ten-seat Learjet swooped down through the cloudless midmorning sky like a falcon, leveling off sharply at 2,000 feet. Inside the cabin, five passengers pressed their foreheads against the windows and peered through the glare across the stark San Rafael Desert, each one anxious to catch a first glimpse of Charity, Utah.

“We’ve sighted the town, Mr. Harten,” the pilot said over the intercom. “About five miles ahead at ten o’clock. We’ve been cleared into Moab, so if it’s okay with you, I’ll make a couple of passes at this altitude and then head over to the airport.”

Within three hours of receiving Laura’s call at his home in Laurel, Virginia, the head of Communigistics International had the government-owned jet on the ground at Boston’s Logan Airport. By 7:30
A.M
. the Lear was airborne once again, streaking west. Sharing the cabin with Neil Harten were an associate of his from Plan B named Thorsen, plus Eric, Laura, and Maggie Nelson.

Twenty-five hundred miles away, they knew, Bernard Nelson lay unconscious, hooked to a ventilator in the intensive care unit of the hospital in Moab. And from what Eric had learned from his conversation with the attending physician, the detective’s condition was not good.

Their Odyssey had begun with an early-morning phone call to Maggie Nelson from a man named Smith in Moab. From what she could tell, her husband had succeeded in finding and penetrating the facility at Charity, Utah, only to be poisoned by the head of the operation there, a physician named Barber. Details of Nelson’s subsequent rescue by a Charity employee named Pike were sketchy, but apparently Barber had been shot and wounded in the process, and another employee killed. Although he was conscious when the ambulance arrived at the town, during the ride to Moab, Bernard had slipped into a coma.

Maggie Nelson’s first move had been to call Laura at Bernard’s Boston apartment.

Now, the travelers stared down in awed silence at the fantastic scene below. The town, barely a smudge on the massive landscape, was surrounded by police cruisers and ambulances. Dozens of people were milling about along the single main street. Others lay on stretchers outside a low cinder-block building.

The pilot made two wide swings overhead, giving those on each side of the aircraft a good look. Then he banked to the east and shot across the rugged desert toward Moab. Seated next to Neil Harten at the rear of the plane, Eric briefed him on what he knew of the poison tetrodotoxin.

With the intervention of Haven Darden, the hospital administration had allowed Eric to search the offices of Dave Subarsky and Norma Cullinet. In a locked box in the nurse’s desk, he found a number of ampules of intravenous adrenaline. He also retrieved two of what appeared to be baby-food jars, each about half-filled with a coarse grayish powder. One had a
small stick-on label reading simply “T.”; and the other, “D.”

When confronted with the find, and a brief explanation of his daughter’s role in the Charity Project, Haven Darden picked up the phone and asked Eric to wait in the corridor outside his hospital room. After just a few minutes, he called him back inside.

“My daughter says that the powder labeled T.’ is what we suspected,” he said. There was great sadness in his eyes, but also undisguised relief in his voice that Rebecca had agreed to cooperate. “The other is some sort of substance to reverse the effects of the toxin. Rebecca says that the dose of the antidote is between two and five grams, and that her cohorts had been dissolving it in saline and administering it intravenously. They also used large doses of adrenaline, but she has no idea of the amount. Most of the work was done in the monitoring room at the mortuary. Later this morning, she has agreed to go with my wife and our attorney to the police.”

“I’m sorry you and your wife have to go through this, sir,” Eric said.

Darden shrugged.

“Who knows how much of a child’s behavior is the fault of the parents?” he said. “Perhaps in the long run some good will come of all this for her and for us.”

The antidote dissolved readily in sterile saline. Working on his tray table in the plane, Eric used a small scale to measure out the dose Haven Darden had suggested, and then carefully drew it up into a large syringe.

“An IV injection of an unknown unsterile powder is not my idea of fun,” he said, “but I can always treat any infection that results.”

“What’s your sense of the doc in Moab?” Harten asked.

“He seemed okay, but he wasn’t too excited about administering the dose of adrenaline I’ve settled on.”

Together, Eric and Darden had reviewed Reed
Marshall’s resuscitation efforts on Loretta Leone, and had determined that his aggressive approach and repeated use of the drug had almost certainly begun reversing her toxicity and increasing the speed and force of her cardiac contractions even while she was awaiting autopsy.

“Belts on, tray tables up, everyone,” the pilot broadcast. “We’re landing.”

“Are you going back up front with Laura?” Harten asked.

Eric shook his head. Throughout the early portion of their flight, Harten had sat with her, candidly answering questions and sharing information about her brother’s life of dangerous service. Over the hours that followed, Eric had seen the reality of Scott’s death take hold.

“She needs a little time by herself,” he said.

“Is she going to stay in Boston?”

“I hope so.”

A soft squeak of the Lear’s main gear signaled the perfect landing in Moab. A police cruiser and two cars raced out to bring the passengers to the hospital. Hand in hand with Laura and Maggie Nelson, Eric hurried up the walk and straight to the ICU.

The local internist had done a remarkable job of holding Bernard together. Although the detective was still unconscious, his blood pressure had begun responding to the massive adrenaline doses the man had given, and his kidneys had already started working.

Neil Harten and the others waited in the small family room as Eric huddled with the internist. While they were administering the tetrodotoxin antidote and another dose of adrenaline, a stretcher bearing another patient was wheeled into the ICU.

Eric moved to help evaluate the new arrival, and found himself staring down at the man who had once been his boss. Craig Worrell, drawn and filthy, stared blankly up at him with rheumy, jaundiced eyes.

“His temp’s one-oh-four,” the ambulance attendant offered.

“Looks like fulminant hepatitis,” Eric said to the internist. “This man’s a doctor from White Memorial in Boston. He was part of that Caduceus group I told you about—at least he was before he got into trouble at the hospital. I guess this is part of the Caduceus early-retirement plan.”

“He looks bad.”

“Maybe that DS-Nineteen wasn’t working as well as Subarsky said it was. You want to work on him?” Eric asked.

“Not really, but I will.”

“I’ll stay with Nelson.”

In just half an hour Bernard Nelson began to show signs of responding to the treatment. Harten and his associate headed off to investigate Charity firsthand, while Laura and Maggie Nelson took up a vigil at Bernard’s bedside.

Two hours passed, during which several cardiac crises arose. Laura clutched Maggie’s hand tightly as they watched Eric move from one side of the bed to the other, checking Bernard’s physical condition, evaluating lab reports and the monitor pattern, and then calmly issuing instructions to the nurse. And she knew that regardless of what lay ahead for the two of them, she would never lose the admiration she was feeling for him at that moment.

Over the next hour, Bernard’s condition seemed to stabilize. The need for Eric’s intervention grew less frequent. Laura could see the deep lines of tension across his forehead begin to recede. Finally, four hours after their arrival, Bernard’s eyes fluttered open. Minutes later, he reached up and pointed to the endotracheal tube, imploring Eric to remove it.

“Has he made it?” Maggie Nelson asked.

Eric took both her hands and helped her up. Then he hugged her.

“You married one tough guy, Mrs. Nelson,” he said. “He’s a real bear.”

“I know,” she said.

He stepped back while she bent over, spoke a few words to her husband, and gently kissed him on the cheek. Then he sent the two women out of the room and motioned the nurse in. Laura watched from a distance as Eric whispered in the detective’s ear, then quickly pulled out the polyethylene breathing tube. Bernard sputtered and gagged as the nurse suctioned out his mouth and pharynx.

For a minute, there was total silence as Eric stood poised to replace the tube at the first sign of trouble. Then Bernard cleared his throat.

“Anyone got a cigar?” he croaked.

One by one, those Charity victims needing the most care were brought into Moab. The rest were transferred to other facilities. Eric worked through the night alongside the hospital staff, treating infections and other vestiges of malnutrition and neglect.

Shortly after dawn the next morning, he left Maggie Nelson with her husband and picked up Laura at the motel where she was staying. Together, they walked along the largely deserted streets of the town. To the south, the sunlight of a new day sparkled off the rich red clay of the hills.

“This place is so beautiful,” she said. “And the hospital seems very good.”

“For a place this size, it is,” Eric said.

Laura locked her arm in his.

“Think you’d ever consider working here?” she asked.

“I think my lowest gear may still be about ten times higher than the highest one I’d ever need here.”