Authors: Hilary Norman
The man still made time to come back to the room for a while every night. It felt good to be there, as it always did. Better than home, better than work, better than anywhere.
And they needed him to come, his little dragons, to change their water and clean their enclosures and make sure they were feeding properly.
He liked watching them eat. The geckos ate live insects – crickets, wax moths, locusts, anything the little creatures could easily overpower. The two green iguanas, with their big spines
and dewlaps, could stay healthy on a diet of chopped cabbage or dog food, but once in a while the man brought them mice or birds’ eggs. And then there were his favourites, his Gila monsters,
almost pretty with their black and pink bands, and smaller and gentler than the iguanas, but the most respected, the most feared, for the grooved teeth that conducted the venom from the glands in
their lower jaws.
“They have very poor eyesight,” the reptile house keeper at the Chicago Zoo had told him. “And they’re real slow moving, they can’t go for the big, fast animals, so
they go for baby rats and fledglings, voles, eggs – anything small enough to swallow whole. They’re nocturnal, too, and real shy, so we don’t know as much about them as we’d
like to, but we think their venom is mostly a defensive mechanism, because unlike snakes, they kill their prey almost instantly by crushing with their jaws.”
“So the venom’s a secondary thing?” the man asked.
“It’s the trauma of the bite that kills, the venom follows involuntarily. These creatures have tremendous jowls and muscle – if they bite you, it’s real hard to get them
off because they hang on, and those grooved teeth are very sharp.”
The man had stared at the single stocky lizard in its glass enclosure.
“Could they kill a man?” he had asked.
“They’ve killed a few, so I’m told, but usually a bite is just damned painful and makes you real sick for a while.”
The man was meticulously careful with his Gila monsters. But then, he was always careful about everything. And patient, too. He’d endured decades of patience. And now it was over. It had
begun.
The finished design for his revenge, complete with scale drawings, mathematical calculations and blueprint for operation, had taken him less than forty-eight hours to conceive.
He had taken one summer weekend, had shut himself up in the room with everything he needed for inspiration; had stocked up from Kuhn’s Delicatessen, bought champagne from House of Glunz,
slotted in his new compact disc version of
Siegfried
, and settled down, opposite the vivaria, to begin.
There had been countless possibilities, many diverse ways of achieving his aim. He understood perfectly every single component that went into a pacemaker, every millimetre of circuitry; he could
read and comprehend it all in the way ordinary people read newspapers or comic strips or stared at their TVs. And that summer weekend, for once allowing his brain full, brilliant, free rein, he had
sifted through the endless permutations, suggesting and dismissing, seeking perfection, purity and flawlessness.
And he had found it.
It was laughably simple, when you came right down to it.
The second stage, the active planning, had proved almost as rapid. He had begun in late August to assemble what he would need, and by mid-September everything had been in place
on his workbench in the room. Everything except the plastique. He didn’t want that stuff anywhere near him until he was ready to begin.
Hagen Pacing was, at that time, producing eight hundred pacemakers each month, at a rate of two hundred per week. Manufacture was, as always, divided into batches of one hundred, each batch in
turn divided down into a further three divisions of thirty-three pacemakers, with one master copy set aside for security. The first hundred were manufactured between Monday morning and Wednesday
noon, the second between then and Friday evening.
He had considered plans of far greater complexity, had been tempted almost beyond endurance by the prospect of producing whole generator boxes, was confident of his ability to make perfect
replicas of the genuine articles. But he knew, nonetheless, that simplicity was best, and so he had controlled his impulses.
On Tuesday and Thursday nights each week, a number of partially assembled boxes were left on the production line, their batteries soldered onto their circuits one stage before being slipped into
their titanium cases and welded shut. His plan was to remove a given number of the partly-assembled devices and bring them to his room, where he would detach the batteries and replace them with his
own, specially created for his purposes. No one would ever challenge him, for his presence during the evenings and sometimes late at night was taken for granted by the security guards.
He had to admit that his own tiny batteries were ingenious, real beauties. Several times during the planning and execution, he had experienced a wave of irrational desire to
show Ashcroft what he was doing. Best brain at Hagen Pacing, and she knew it, how she knew it, in spite of her refined, quiet manner. He’d have liked to have seen her face, to see the naked
admiration in her eyes. But Mother’s voice still sounded a warning rebuke in his head. Self-control above everything.
The lithium batteries used in all the Hagen pacemakers were manufactured by an independent supplier. They were tiny and powerful – they had to be since they were expected to provide life
for the pulse generators for ten to twelve years. His plan was to duplicate the stainless-steel casing of these batteries and to insert four components into each of these hollow cases. A smaller
battery, identical in chemistry to the original. A piece of micro-circuitry. Half an ounce of plastique explosive. And a detonator.
Being smaller, his active battery would not operate the pacemaker for anywhere near as long as the larger battery would, but under the circumstances that hardly mattered. A major consideration
during planning had been that though under normal circumstances most pacemakers would be implanted well within one year of production, all Hagen devices were released from the factory with a use-by
date of two years from their date of manufacture. He had elected, therefore, to incorporate within his battery a timing circuit to ensure that the countdown to detonation would only begin after
implantation.
There, he had encountered some problems. Hagen Pacing ran rigorous checking and testing procedures, including post-assembly tests designed to mimic the effects of implantation in the human body,
to ensure that each pacemaker would work effectively when needed. His circuitry, therefore, would have to distinguish those tests from the real thing, and so he had incorporated a simple counter to
register the current being drained from the battery at all times. While a pacemaker was in storage, the drain was tiny. Once implanted, it went up in a great leap. The change from quiescent to
operational was easy enough to detect, but the same leap would, of course, occur during the checks after final welding. Those checks took fifteen minutes, and so his circuitry had not only to
detect that the battery was running in its pacing mode, but also to count a given number of pulses in that working mode.
All patients receiving a pacemaker implant remained in hospital for at least twenty-four hours, and a week to ten days after the procedure they returned for a check-up and further testing of
their device. It was vital, therefore, that detonation did not take place until after the final discharge of the patient. Once again, the solution had been devastatingly simple. Set to count at a
rate of sixty pulses per minute, all that the circuitry within his battery needed to do was to count to one million pulses in the pacing mode, and then, automatically, to arm its own secondary
timing circuit and to count down from there to the point of detonation.
Only one more problem had remained. Once it began – once people had begun to die – it was just a matter of time until they started X-raying patients to check out their pacemakers. On
regular hospital X-rays, the steel-cased battery in a pacemaker showed up a small, opaque mass, but when they increased the kilo voltage for a higher penetration beam – and they would, once
they knew what they were looking for – they would be able to see his added circuitry – not the plastique explosive, of course, but they would see his timing device, and that would just
make it too easy for them. They could set up mass screenings and for all but the few, the very select few, the panic would be over. It wasn’t that he planned to get away with it in the
long-term – that wasn’t the point of this at all, not for him. It was his game. It was their pain, their nightmare, their punishment. And he planned to draw it out for as long as
possible. He’d waited too long for anything less.
Screwing up the X-rays for them turned out to be simple too. Easy as falling off a log. He’d make three times as many, that was all. Two-thirds with added circuitry only, one-third with
circuitry and plastique. Just to throw them off, to increase the confusion, the fear, the hysteria.
From the last week of September until the penultimate week of November, he had removed six partially assembled pacemakers every Tuesday and Thursday evening, replacing them in
the early hours of the next morning with his own batteries soldered to the Hagen circuitry, two of them the real thing, the other four dummies. He was perfectly confident that all his Midnight
Specials, as he called them, would pass every inspection. The cases were impeccable in every way, right down to their serial numbers.
By the time his work was complete, ninety-six customized pacemakers had sat snugly in their titanium, laser-welded, hermetically sealed cases, awaiting delivery to hospitals and
cardiologists’ offices all over the country. Thirty-two of them were miniaturized time bombs. The man could easily have made twice or three times as many, but this was more than adequate.
This would kill, this would baffle, bewilder and terrify. This would master and slay dragons.
He had dismantled his workbench and equipment, burned what he could and driven everything that could not be burned to a dump site halfway between Chicago and Gary, Indiana. He had kept precisely
detailed records of what he had done, and then, for his very last trick, he had created five more sets of records, all of them equally intricate but false, so that if and when they finally tracked
it down to him, he’d be able to take the torture a step further, set phoney trails, drive them crazier. Make them beg. Make them pay.
Just two weeks into the New Year, and innocent people were dying.
But then, they always did.
The new case was proving the real bitch Joe had guessed it would be. Hagen’s quality control man, Fred Schwartz, was as able and thorough as Hagen had claimed, but his
steadily increasing dismay, frustration and weariness were obvious, his small mouth still set with determination but the hazel eyes ever more red-rimmed and darkly shadowed. Each nighttime since
Monday had seen the factory taken systematically apart in an effort to find evidence, but not a shred had been found, and so Hagen Pacing remained, for the moment, in business. Meantime, in a
secure area well away from the workforce, Schwartz was dismantling and checking every master copy and all the remaining suspect stock, assisted and overseen every inch of the way by the eagle-eyed
Tony Valdez from Bomb and Arson, but their progress remained painfully slow. Checks on the backgrounds of every member, past and present, of the Hagen workforce and the freight company they used
had, thus far, yielded not a single criminal record nor apparent motive. Commander Jackson, with the chief on his back, was gnawing at his well-kept fingernails, and Joe, guilt-ridden about his
inability to take care of his pregnant and vulnerable wife, had suggested to Jess that she take Sal to her parents for the visit she’d been planning for months.
“This would be a real good time for you to go, Jess.”
“Why?” Her soft brown eyes were suspicious.
“Because I’m going to be working around the clock on this new case – and I mean around the clock – and because I’m going to be bringing the paperwork home with me,
and because I’m not allowed to tell you anything about it, and you know me, I hate it when I can’t share important stuff with you, and it’s going to drive me nuts.”
“So this has nothing to do with any kind of danger?”
Joe knew she was afraid. “No danger, Jess, I swear it. Just a heap of work, and I’m not going to be nice to know until it’s over.”
“So it’s another big one.”
“The biggest.”
“And you’re going to get crabby, and you think I need looking after because of the baby, and so if I’m around, you’ll just feel guilty and that’ll make you even
crabbier.”
“You got it.”
“And you swear you’re not in any danger?” Jess raised her chin in a challenge, bouncing her chestnut curls a little.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Joe said, and winced inwardly.
“I’ll call Mom in the morning.”
“I love you, Jess.”
“I know.”
Joe hated sending her away. But then he hated just about everything about this case. There was such a nasty element of remoteness about it all. Not seeing the victims, thank God. Not being privy
to the immediate, overwhelming horror that normally fuelled the rage that was a part – a necessary part – of any homicide investigation. Whenever Joe saw a murder victim, saw men,
women, sometimes children – most of all, the children – slashed or cut up, or shot or beaten, or burned or Christ alone knew what, he suffered the same kind of agonies that most of his
colleagues did in the struggle to detach from them. And then, too, in most murder cases, there was the need to learn about the victims, to discover every last detail about them, anything that might
help them get the killer. But it had quickly become plain that all of that wouldn’t get them anywhere in the pacemaker case. The victims in Boston and Chicago were not connected in any way;
they were random victims, their only link here, at the point of their pacemakers’ origin. There was no reason for Joe to discover anything more about Jack Long or Marie Ferguson than he
already knew. They were simply victims, and it all felt so
cold
, so passionless, and though Joe had learned, over the years, the importance of professional detachment, he was aware that
passion, to him, was still a necessary evil in any investigation.