“Yeah, it’s been a rough day, but…”
Ling was tall and thin, long black hair swept off a narrow forehead. Derek looked into his eyes and saw nothing. Black orbs with no life in them. The man’s lack of emotion chilled him and he flinched away from Ling’s long fingers as the doctor touched his cheek and moved his head back and forth slowly, examining him. Derek jerked away. “Leave me alone,” he snarled.
Ling didn’t say anything, but cocked his head. In lightly accented English, he said, “Lay down, please.”
“No.”
Ling nodded to the two guards, who roughly shoved him down on the examining table. Ling opened a cabinet to reveal a tray of sterilized surgical instruments. “Cut off the cuffs and secure his arms and legs to the table, please. I need to take a closer look at his wounds.”
“I’m—”
Ling gave a quiet, “Ssshhhhh, Dr. Stillwater. Please cooperate.”
Derek didn’t have much choice. The two men, Sven and his partner, a stringy, wiry guy with Slavic features that he had started thinking of as Ivan, cut off his cuffs and forced him back on the table. He knew he could take them if they got careless. The two guys were dangerous, but he could kill them. But then he would have to get past Ling and Coffee and out of this place with a dozen armed men all too willing to gun him down. And escaping wasn’t why he was here. Although he had absolutely zero idea how to do it and the rock-solid knowledge that his odds of accomplishing it were probably less than zero, his mission was to locate Chimera M13. His mission was to retrieve or destroy it, and at the very least determine what Coffee and his Fallen Angels intended to do with it.
Derek’s wrists and ankles were placed in padded cuffs and secured. Their presence didn’t bode well, Derek thought. This was not exactly a medical clinic if they were prepared to restrain their patients. They could act like he was a patient, but he knew better. Dread crept up on him like a rising tide, but he forced it away, concentrating on the cover story he had created on the trip here. Ling walked over to him, a pair of scissors in his hands. He stood over Derek a moment, the shiny metal scissors held in front of Derek’s face, as if the man was debating on exactly what to do with them. To trim his hair, to cut his nails, to plunge the sharp shiny points into his eye socket. Derek stared past them into Ling’s face, into his lifeless eyes, looking for signs of humanity and not finding it.
Carefully Ling began to cut off Derek’s clothing. The only sound was the snip and snick of the scissors and the soft plop of his tattered clothing falling to the floor of the trailer.
The scissors were cold against his flesh and Derek found he had to control himself from trembling. He knew, rationally, that there was more than medicine going on here. He knew that forcing a prisoner to be naked gave the captors both a physical and psychological advantage.
Knowing did not necessarily help in dealing with the vulnerability.
After a few minutes he was totally naked on the table, arms and legs immobile. “Gee, you could have asked me to disrobe,” he said, oddly grateful they had left his beads and four-leaf clover.
Carefully Ling peeled away the dressing the Coast Guardsman had placed over the gouge in his ribs caused by the D.C. cop’s gunshot. Ling pulled over a lamp on a tensile steel arm and shined the harsh light on the wound. “You are showing some early signs of infection. But it is not deep. It needs to be cleaned again.”
Ling pulled on Latex rubber gloves and retrieved a bottle of saline. Carefully, skillfully, he began to wash out the wound, blotting it gently with sterile gauze. Derek was not calmed by this. Instead, he was worried. Ling had skills. Ling… knew things.
Ling nodded his head and said, “It will require a few stitches and antibiotics. This wound in your leg, however, is another matter. It is deeper than the wound in your ribs. Hmmm…” He nodded thoughtfully to himself, picked up a metal probe and looked over at Richard Coffee who had been watching silently from next to the doorway. Ling nodded.
Coffee walked over to the examining table and looked down at Derek. “Where’s Irina Khournikova?”
Derek said, “When I was with her I got a phone call from my FBI contact. He had found out that Halloran, the head guy at U.S. Immuno, had been having an affair with a Russian national named Irina Khournikova. Her cover was blown. I overpowered her and turned her over to the FBI. She should be at FBI Headquarters now, under interrogation.”
Coffee said, “Interesting,” and nodded to Ling.
Ling took his stainless steel probe and deliberately, almost delicately, forced it into the wound in Derek’s ribs. It felt as if a lance had ripped right through him. His body screamed as if every nerve had been dipped in acid. Lights exploded in his head and he shrieked, the sound seeming to come from outside him, from someone else.
Ling withdrew the probe, a slight smile crossing his lean face. “Yes, that worked rather well, didn’t it? Nerve induction. It is a science. And you conveniently left me two openings in your body to probe the nerve directly. Saved me the time and trouble of doing so myself. Now, I believe The Fallen had a question. Where is the woman you know as Irina Khournikova?”
Derek stared at the man, sweat beading off his forehead, burning into his eyes. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. He could feel his heart thundering in his ears, taste blood in his mouth. “I… told…”
Ling inserted the probe once again and this time the pain exploded along his body like an electric charge and Derek let himself chase the exploding lights behind his eyes into darkness.
36
General Johnston was shrugging back into street clothing when Colonel Zataki appeared at the door of the examining room. Zataki now wore Army fatigues, his face pale, expression worried.
“He wants to see us,” Zataki said.
Johnston cocked his head as he buttoned his shirt. “Have you talked to him?”
“No. I just got in contact with my people at the Institute. I’ve got to get back there.”
“Anything new?”
Zataki scowled. “Halloran committed suicide; Scully’s dead; Vargas, the only remaining expert on Chimera, accidentally infected herself with it and is starting to show early signs of the infection. For all I know that’s the good news. God only know what the bad news is going to be. How about you?”
“Well, my hand-picked second-in-command managed to assassinate most of the heads of the U.S. government and the FBI thinks my hand-picked troubleshooter is involved with it as well.”
Zataki’s face grew even paler, if that was possible. Slowly he said, “The Bureau thinks Stillwater’s involved in this?”
Johnston buttoned the top button of his shirt and began working on his tie. “Dalton e-mailed Stillwater around eleven today with some cryptic message: ‘The Ascent has begun.’ The bureau thinks it’s a reference to the operation at U.S. Immuno.”
“Huh.” Zataki looked at his hands a moment. “This thing has all the feel of a full-blown act of war, Jim. We’re fighting on multiple fronts, all of then unconventional. Biological, chemical, psychological. It’s terrorism, but organized.”
“Yeah, like three fucking jets into skyscrapers. I know.”
Zataki shook his head. “I’ve known Derek Stillwater a long time. I can’t see him involved in this.”
“Well, I’ve known Sam Dalton for a long time, too, and he wouldn’t have been my first candidate to decapitate the U.S. government with VX gas.”
“But Derek…”
“I know.” Johnston pulled his tie tight as if trying to strangle himself. “Over the years I’ve worked with Dalton he was always a by-the-book guy. Always did what was needed, followed orders, followed the chain-of-command.”