McBride’s right arm was almost free. “What’s ‘Jericho’?” he asked.
Opdahl looked impressed. “My, you have been doing your homework, haven’t you?”
“What is it?”
The surgeon took a long drag on his cigarette, and blew a stream of smoke into the air. Then he cocked his head at McBride. “Are you trying to get out of that thing?” When McBride didn’t reply, he made a little moue, and said, “Well, good luck to you.” Shoving away from the desk, he went around to the window, and looked out at the snow. Musing over his shoulder, he muttered, “Jericho,” then turned around to McBride. “You’ll just forget it in the morning, anyway,” he said, and began pacing, moving in a wide, counterclockwise circle around the room.
“You don’t know—you have no idea—what any of this is all about,” Opdahl told him. “The Institute, the clinic—they’re a lot more than they seem.” He paused to consider. “Think of this place as… the crossroads of Realpolitik and Realmedizin. It’s where they come together.”
McBride’s elbow was caught on the edge of a sleeve. Just a little bit more and…
“As a surgeon, it’s my responsibility to cut out diseased tissue. The Institute has the same responsibility, except that its patients are states instead of individuals.”
“In other words, you kill people.”
“We remove cancers.”
“Like Nelson Mandela?” McBride asked, sagging with relief as his right arm came free inside the straitjacket.
Opdahl paused in his circuit, and looked at his prisoner. Finally, he said, “Not just Mandela. Mbeki, too. And Tutu—too.” He smiled at his own pun. “They’ll all be at Davos—hobnobbing. Me, too. I like to watch.”
Jericho’s scope was suddenly apparent: the operation represented a clean sweep of South Africa’s black leadership, eliminating at a single stroke the country’s founding father, serving president, and moral conscience. “You’re out of your mind,” McBride told him.
“That’s funny,” Opdahl replied, “coming from a man in a straitjacket.” Only for a little while longer, McBride thought, using his right hand to begin freeing his left arm. “Why would you even think of something like this?”
Opdahl shrugged. “A patient has a boil—we lance it. That’s all we’re doing here.” Seeing McBride’s frown, and misinterpreting it, Opdahl elaborated: “Think of it as a ‘preemptive bloodletting.’ The country needs to be bled. De Groot will set it in motion.” He paused again, and added, “What happens in Davos, explodes in Capetown.”
“And Calvin Crane?”
Opdahl couldn’t hide his surprise. “You are dangerous,” he told him, returning to the chair behind his desk. “Mr. Crane became an obstacle. He had certain… liberal objections to Jericho’s targets, and ethical concerns about some related investments. So he got in the way… for a while.”
“What ‘investments’?”
Opdahl shrugged, and looked away. “The Institute costs a lot of money—the clinic, too. Neither of them are self-supporting.”
“So?”
“So we bought platinum futures—quite a lot of them.”
McBride frowned.
“Just between you and me, South Africa’s about to enter a period of profound instability” Opdahl explained. “I think we can count on the fact that platinum’s going to go through the roof. The Institute will benefit from that in a substantial way. And with those new resources, its influence will expand—so will mine, for that matter.”
McBride shook his head. “Have you always been like this?”
Opdahl nodded. “I was a wicked child.”
McBride withdrew his left arm from the sleeve of the straitjacket, and heaved a sigh of relief. Both arms were free inside the jacket, now, though still concealed.
Reaching for the intercom on his desk, Opdahl punched in a couple of numbers, and waited for the call to be picked up. “Frank? Gunnar here. I wonder if you’d come to my office for a moment. There’s someone I’d like you to see.” Hanging up, he sat back in his swivel chair, and began a series of slow turns, his head thrown back and eyes turned toward the ceiling. “Doctor Morgan assisted on your earlier operation. He’ll be doing the surgery. I’d do it myself, but… Davos.” He paused. “Which reminds me: how did you find out about Jericho?”
McBride shook his head slowly. If he wanted to, he could come across the desk before Opdahl knew what hit him—break his neck. Better, though, to find out as much as he could. “How’s de Groot going to do it?”
Opdahl smiled. “Me first. I asked you a question.”
For a moment, it occurred to McBride to tell the truth about Crane’s papers—but no. If something went wrong in the next five minutes, Mamie Winkelman would pay for it. So he lied. “It came out in a session with Henrik—bits and pieces.”
Opdahl frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “The client isn’t supposed to be aware—”
“He was way under.”
“I’ll bet… “ A soft knock came at the door. “Come in.”
McBride turned in his seat to see a powerfully built, handsome young man enter the room, wearing a set of blue hospital scrubs.
“Frank,” Opdahl said, “you remember Jeff Duran, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Morgan replied.
“No need to shake hands,” Opdahl joked. “I was just telling Jeff that you’ll be operating on him this evening.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. You’ve been itching to replicate H.M.’s condition—and now’s your chance. Jeff’s become a disposal case, haven’t you, Jeff?”
Morgan winced in mock sympathy.
“So? What do you think?” Opdahl asked, as if he’d just given the young surgeon a new puppy. “You like the idea?”
“‘Like’ it!?” Morgan exclaimed. “‘Like it’!?” Coming to McBride’s side, he touched a spot just below his hairline. “I’ll go in here,” he began.
McBride came out of the chair like a boulder from a volcano, driving his head into the surgeon’s chin, then tearing off the straitjacket to lunge at the shocked Gunnar Opdahl. Who slapped a button on the edge of his desk, triggering a silent alarm, even as he shoved backward in his swivel chair, retreating toward the window.
McBride was on him in a second, scrambling across the desk to seize him by the throat. Lifting the older man from the chair, he drove the surgeon’s face into the wall, yanked him back, and drove his head into and through the window, hoping it would cut his throat. And it might have, if Morgan hadn’t taken out McBride’s legs from behind, sweeping them with a karate kick that sent the younger man sprawling.
Opdahl staggered in a little circle, trying to breathe and shout at the same time, choking as McBride crabbed backward across the floor, driven by Morgan’s kicks.
He could hear people running down the hall, now, shouting in English and German, even as Morgan tried to kick a field goal with his head. Catching the surgeon by the heel, McBride twisted, hard, and torqued him to the floor with a crash of glass from a toppling lamp. Lurching to his knees, McBride drove his fist into the back of the surgeon’s skull, sending him sprawling, then dove for the box on the sofa. Tearing at the cardboard to get at the trigger, he succeeded at the very moment the door burst open and Rutger and Heinz came charging in, eyes wild.
“Ergreifen Sie ihn!” Opdahl screamed, fumbling in the desk for the Sig Sauer that he knew was there.
The guards blitzed, rushing the American even as he backpedaled with the curtain rod box in his hands—the box exploding as Gunther moved to brush it aside, sending a spray of blood and bits at the opposite wall. The fat guard, Heinz, stopping on a pfennig, eyes ballooning, hands in the air, as McBride swung the shotgun in an arc and Opdahl began blasting with the Sig Sauer, hitting everything in the room but his target. And McBride working the slide with real composure now, his left hand sliding back and forth on the barrel as if it were the fingerboard of a Stratocaster, pumping and firing, pumping and firing, taking Morgan out at the knees even as the surgeon bolted for the door—then turning on Opdahl whose mouth made a little O of horror in the split second that he had to think about things, just before McBride plastered his forehead on the acoustical tiles overhead.