“Let me help you up,” he said, and offered her his hand.
Maggie Flavier rolled over on the earth in front of him. Her face seemed strange. Taut, a little swollen. Her mouth flapped open as if out of control. Her lips were a vivid shade of red, and her green eyes stared up at him in terror.
“Ow, ow, OW …” she screamed, and gripped her stomach in agony.
The apple tumbled from her hand, half eaten. Costa bent down. Stupidly, automatically, he picked up the piece of fruit and sniffed it. A strange, unexpected aroma rose from the flesh. Almonds, he thought, and the word caused alarm, for reasons he couldn’t place.
A physical tremor gripped her thin body. She stiffened. Her head jerked back, golden hair thrusting into the dank leaves and earth, then rolled sideways. A cry of pain and astonishment and anger emerged from her lips. Then a thin stream of bile began to trickle from her mouth onto the ground, her breathing became short and laboured, her body started to arch in harsh involuntary spasms.
Someone was approaching, fast and deliberate.
His hands held hers until the last moment. Then Costa rose, turning, saw the powerful, muscular shape of a man in a red-checked lumberjack shirt, with something black and threatening in his hand, closing on them.
There wasn’t time to think anything through. He took one step forward and lashed out with his right fist, caught the intruder on the chin, punched hard again, was satisfied to see the corpulent frame start to fall backwards, the object in his hand tumbling into the dead leaves.
It was a camera, a big black SLR.
Costa blinked, felt hopeless, uncertain where his attention ought to lie.
The man on the ground started swearing at him. Costa didn’t listen. He turned and looked at the stricken woman, crouched next to her again. Her eyes were starting to roll back under the lids. She seemed barely conscious. Her breathing appeared dreadfully fast and shallow. The convulsions had fallen into a terrifying regime, one that was slowing with each diminishing lungful of air.
They trained a police officer for this kind of event. But that was on a different continent, in a different language.
Whoever the man was, he wasn’t a threat. Not an obvious one at that moment.
All the same, as the hulking figure in the red shirt retrieved his camera and began to scuttle away, firing off shots all the time, Costa took one quick step towards him, kicked hard at his arm as it held the camera, heard the snap of fracturing bone.
There was a scream. The figure was on the ground again, still trying to scramble crab-like through the desiccated leaves covering the forest floor. Costa turned, stepped forward, and stood quite deliberately on his shattered limb for a moment, then waited for the cries of agony to subside a little.
“Dove …” he began, then shook his head to clear it. “Where are we? I need to know the location. Now. Before this woman dies.”
“You saw the sign,” the man in the red shirt spat at him, clutching his arm and the camera as if each was of equal value.
“Where?” Costa bellowed, and lifted his foot again, eyeing the tortured, crooked arm.
The photographer shrank back in fear. “Rob Hill Campground. Now leave me alone.”
Nic was only dimly aware that the man was crawling off somewhere. And that the sound of the camera was there again, diminishing as the paparazzo retreated, like the chirp of some electronic bird fading into the lowering dark.
Costa got down on the ground next to her, held her damp, sweating, twitching hand, leaned into her head, ignoring the foul smell rising from her agonies. He put his lips to her ear, then, not knowing whether she could hear, he began to murmur, over and over again, “Stay with me, stay with me, stay …”
Her breathing seemed to stop for a moment. Her eyes opened. Maggie Flavier’s face was puffy and soaked in sweat and tears. But her right hand was jerking towards something. He looked into her eyes. They were calm, determined. As if she’d been here before.
She was pointing at the bag. He picked it up and turned it upside down, emptying the contents onto the forest floor.
The kit was there, with a red cross on the outside, and inside it were instructions and a primed syringe that looked like a pen. The drill he’d learned from the medical trainers flooded back. He tore open the pack, withdrew the needle, removed the cap, bent down, and in one sure, forceful move thrust the injector into her right thigh, through the fabric of her jeans.
Maggie half screamed, half sighed, and her head fell back hard, hitting the ground.
Still he held the pen there firmly, and kept his left hand in her hair. After ten seconds, as gently as he could, he eased the needle out of her flesh before checking that the drug had been dispensed. Then he threw the thing into the spent dry leaves.
She was sobbing. He cradled her in his arms, making comforting, wordless sounds, grappling for the phone, fighting to find the right language to use in this strange, foreign country.
From somewhere, finally, the words came.
He dialled 911, waited an agonisingly long time, then said, knowing the name would make a difference, not caring about whether that was right or wrong or just plain stupid, “I need an ambulance at the Rob Hill Campground, near the Legion of Honor, now. I have an actress here, Maggie Flavier. She’s in anaphylactic shock and we need a paramedic team immediately. I’ve given her …” The words danced elusively in his head until he snatched up the discarded syringe package and examined the label. “… epinephrine. It’s serious. She needs oxygen and immediate transfer to hospital.”
The line went quiet.
Then a distant male voice asked, “You mean the Maggie Flavier?”
“I do,” Costa answered calmly, and tried to remember something, anything about CPR.
PART 4
1
Catherine Bianchi sat at the wheel of her Dodge minivan looking as if she were worried about her career. Falcone was by her side, Peroni and Teresa Lupo in the back. Ahead, like ancient aircraft hangars at a decayed military installation ranged along the Bay shoreline, rose Fort Mason. Three buildings were bright with recent paint. Above the central one, a good ten metres high, stood the waving, multiarmed logo of Lukatmi. Its neon flashed in the dazzling morning sun.
The American police captain took a deep breath. She muttered, “You guys are going to get me into real trouble, aren’t you?”
They had an appointment with Josh Jonah and Tom Black inside Lukatmi headquarters. If Bryant Street got to hear of it, there’d be plenty of awkward questions. It was difficult to see how interviewing the bosses of a digital media firm, albeit one heavily involved in financing Inferno, could possibly be justified given their tight and supposedly unbreakable orders: watch over the assembly of the exhibition, nothing more.
“You don’t have to join us if you don’t want,” Falcone told Catherine. “I do think we have the right to be here.”
That got him a fierce look in return.
“The Palace of Fine Arts, with all your precious stuff, is that way. There’s not a single thing in those Lukatmi buildings that concerns you, Leo. There’s nothing there but geeks and computers. We should be back where we’re supposed to be.” She seemed as exasperated as the rest of them. “Twiddling our thumbs and waiting to be told what to do next.”
Falcone leaned back in his seat and sighed. “What we do next is look for the money.”
Teresa Lupo realised she didn’t have the energy to engage in that particular argument again. The same circular bout of bitching had rumbled on all morning, in between the inquiries to the hospital and the calls from an infuriated Quattrocchi and an equally livid Gerald Kelly of the SFPD. It was now two days since the attack on Maggie Flavier. The temperature hadn’t cooled.