Unacceptable Risk sw-2 Page 14

  They proceeded out of the next room and into a hall, ap parently having circumvented the main workroom where the others waited. There were several doors off this hall, but only one was labeled. It was in Portuguese and Grady couldn't understand its meaning. Grady guessed it was another lab, or perhaps a back door.

  "In there," Gaudet said.

  Inside were three treadmills and IV stands alongside each. It was some kind of physical-fitness testing area.

  "Put your hands behind you," Gaudet said.

  Instead, she looked around desperately, trying to imagine some way of escape, some salvation. Anything. But there was nothing.

  "If you don't do it, I'll cut your face." A metallic sound, and she saw his razor-sharp knife.

  She put her hands behind her and felt the cool steel close over her wrists. She felt herself starting to cry but stopped the tears knowing it would only incite Gaudet.

  "See there, Michael? She's already imagining what I'll do to her and I haven't even told her yet. See the fear in her face? You could save her from great suffering."

  "What do you want?"

  Gaudet took a cord from his pocket. One end was tied with a hangman's noose.

  "I carried this just for you. All that time we were walking from the room to the elevator and then from the elevator to here, I was playing with it in my pocket, waiting for the mo ment when I would slip it around your neck. Back up," he said to her. There was a wall and there were hooks on the wall for lab coats. He put the noose around her neck and drew it taut until it bit into her neck, constricting her airway. Next he was tying something and then he lifted her and it choked her again. Her eyes felt as if they were filling with blood. She fell back. Again he tied the line and lifted her. This time it remained taut.

  "Stand on your toes." Pushing herself up, she could just breathe. Sharp pains cut through her feet as she struggled to keep the noose from tightening further. She had to remain on the balls of her feet or suffocate.

  "Don't hurt her," Michael said. "Tell me what you want. Be rational."

  Gaudet spoke quickly and without emotion. "You discov ered some organic material and sent it to Northern Lights. They in turn sold it to Grace Technologies. It had a profound effect on the human immune system. You understand what I'm saying, don't you?"

  "I've heard about this substance, yes. And I believe it came from my work in the Amazon. But I collect thousands of samples each year. I have no idea which one worked in this way."

  "Come, Dr. Bowden. You can do better than that." The knife tip bit into Grady's cheek. Blood trickled down to her neck.

  "Depraved bastard," she said, through clenched teeth. "Don't tell him."

  "Stop!" Bowden shouted. "Northern Lights showed special interest in a freshwater sponge. Maybe that's what you need. I first located it in 1998."

  Gaudet seemed not to hear him. "You've heard how rape terrifies women, haven't you? It's nothing, nothing, compared to what a woman feels when you start cutting her face."

  "I just told you what I know."

  "Keep telling."

  "I found it in a deep water stream in the Yavari Reserve. Six days' fast walk from a point about thirty miles above Angamos. The coordinates are in my 1998 journal."

  "Where is the journal?"

  "On its way to Cornell University."

  "You understand how that doesn't help me, don't you?" The steel was back at Grady's face, the point working its way into her flesh.

  "Tell him something." Michael plead with Grady.

  "Raval," Grady choked out. "A man named Raval."

  "What about Raval?"

  "A Grace scientist. He may know how the m-molecule w-works," Grady sputtered.

  "What molecule?" Gaudet demanded.

  She quit talking.

  "Tell him," Michael said again.

  "It's Chaperone."

  "Do you know about Chaperone?" Gaudet asked Mi chael.

  "I heard about it from Grady's associate. Robert Chase."

  "Oh, is that what he calls himself now? Well, Chaperone is merely a word. Make it more than a word."

  "I would if I could. I don't understand it," Michael con fessed.

  "Mmm-hmm. Do you want me to cut her face or her body first? Which will it be?"

  "We're telling you everything we know."

  Gaudet ripped the buttons down Grady's blouse and the yanking motion choked her. Grady lost her footing and struggled. The ceiling was starting to move. As the rope bit into her neck, she began gagging and couldn't stop. It felt as if her eyes were going to explode.

  "Well, look at that, she's going to die."

  His words were echoing now and she knew he was right. Her feet wouldn't support her and her legs were giving way. She felt her bladder go and the urine running down her legs. Then her body was hanging. It felt separate from the rest of her, quivering as Gaudet's hands touched her and his voice moved in circles like the ceiling.

  "She pissed herself." She realized that Gaudet was prop ping her feet under her. In a few moments her legs supported her, but she was still on her toes.

  "This can be terrifying as well," Gaudet was saying. "Hitler slowly hanged his errant generals repeatedly with piano wire. Doesn't your girl deserve better?"

  Ignoring the pain in his leg, Michael rolled off the gurney and lunged at Gaudet. The look on Gaudet's face was grati fying, but a terrible thought entered Michael's mind. If he took down Gaudet, Grady would hang unsupported and suf focate.

  Gaudet smiled as if reading his mind. Then the door be hind Michael burst open. Michael fell clumsily to the ground, white-hot pain shooting from his leg up his spine.

  Robert Chase stood in the doorway.

  Gaudet was backing away, his gun aimed at Grady, who was beginning to choke as the rope tightened. Robert moved swiftly to Grady to stop her strangling. Gaudet fired a single shot at Robert, then vanished out the door.

  The bullet knocked Robert to the floor, and Grady began to choke again. Miraculously, Robert jumped back up and untied Grady, who fell into his arms. Her voice was barely more than a rasp, but Michael thought he heard her moan, "Sam."

  Yodo entered, then ran out in the direction of Sam's nod. Sam closed up Grady's shirt and held her in his arms, but she pulled away and knelt over Michael, her eyes drawn to his leg.

  The leg hurt and blood was seeping through the ban dages, but Grady had stopped crying, indeed she was smiling at him, and that was all that mattered to Bowden.

  Sam forced his mind away from the pain in his chest where the steel breastplate had compressed the flak jacket under the force of the bullet. Even experienced killers like Gaudet in the heat of the moment, and desiring an easy target, often automatically shot for the center of the chest.

  As much as he wanted to chase Gaudet, his rational mind told him to stay with the targets, Grady and Michael, or risk losing them forever.

  He lifted Michael back onto the gurney, and Grady rolled it back down the hospital corridor. It was still quiet; one would never know that a half-dozen bodyguards were chasing a madman through the bowels of the hospital.

  One of Sam's men from upstairs ran to Sam and stopped.

  "If you find him. Kill him," Sam commanded.

  "Roger that." And the man was gone.

  They took Michael to his room, where nurses swarmed him, checking the sutures even before the doctor arrived. Dr. Ayala's death had produced many somber faces. Soon the off-duty guards began congregating and Sam began with the new instructions. Grady showed no emotion whatsoever and Sam knew it was a tour de force of self-control that would end when the danger was past. When the last of the guards was in place and Yodo had returned from a fruitless search, Grady stepped out of the room. Sam followed and found her sobbing against a wall. Without waiting for good-byes Sam walked her to the elevators and out to the front of the hospi tal, where he hailed a cab and took her to her room at the Copacabana Palace. Safe at the hotel, she still had a bit of a strange look in her eyes and there was terrible bruising on
her neck. When he nudged her to take a shower, and he tried to close the bathroom door, she started crying. When he opened it, she clung to him-and so he waited for what seemed a half hour, just holding her. This time when he closed the door, she took a shower. When she had donned new under wear and a T-shirt, he crawled, fully clothed, in bed with her. Wrapping his arms around her back, he held her tight and taught her to breathe in her nose and out her mouth-slow, regular deep breaths. Then he told her things that Grandfather had told him when he first knew him. He told them as Grand father had told them to him as best he could remember them. Then Grady slept.

  Baptiste walked through London's Heathrow Airport to the location where he was to meet Rene. It was like a rat maze and didn't have the open feel of the tall-ceilinged de Gaulle International Airport. The smells from the abundant restaurants, which according to Baptiste ranked among the worst in the world, forced him to breathe through his mouth.

  He met Rene at the gate to the flight to Turkey.

  "Are you getting anything out of Benoit?" Rene asked without preliminaries.

  "She's cooperating. I think she's dribbling out the information. I'll see her again soon. Have you found Bowden's location? Confirmed that he survived?"

  "Neither, though I can't imagine the shots killed him. I'll tell you, if Sam and his people spy as well as they fight, we'll never find Bowden now."

  "Don't let the admiral hear you say that. I'll expect a re port when I return from Turkey. Make sure you learn some thing."

  "Shall I use Meeks?" Rene asked.

  "No. Stay away from Figgy."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don't trust him completely."

  "But you're basing this Turkey trip on intel he gave you," Rene countered.

  "Just do your job."

  This was hardly a typical business trip to Turkey. It started with a flight from London to another international airport, followed by a ride in a government car down a highway, followed by a descent into the bowels of a government building in the desert that Baptiste hoped never to see again. When he arrived at the building, he encountered a gate in the midst of a Cyclone fence topped with razor wire. It wasn't as secure as a prison, but, then, when people were brought to this place, they were quickly reduced to physical wrecks and it didn't take much to hold them.

  At the gate the guard spoke Turkish. Baptiste shrugged his shoulders, lapsing into English.

  "I am a special contractor for the CIA."

  "And I am Mickey Mouse." The man smirked. "How would I know this?"

  "Because if I lied to your officer, you would make me drink camel piss and send me home a eunuch. That or kill me. Look, Figgy Meeks sent me."

  "Why didn't you say so?"

  Inside the building they stopped at a desk manned by a sergeant and two guards. The sergeant looked up with a steady, confident stare.

  "What do you want?"

  "Figgy Meeks, a CIA contractor, said you had a prisoner that I could interview. This man allegedly knows about a plot against the United States."

  "We don't allow foreigners here. There must be some mix-up."

  "I'll need to speak to your superior officer, then," Baptiste bluffed.

  The sergeant stared at him a moment, then went down the hall and turned into a room. In a moment an officer ap peared. Baptiste couldn't tell his rank from his shirt.

  "What do you want?"

  Baptiste repeated himself.

  "I was told you might come. I can brief you. Alfawd knows nothing of significance, as I'm sure you already know."

  "I still need to talk with him."

  "Please, you are not the CIA. You are the French. So go to hell."

  Baptiste felt a wave of fear and anger. He pulled his gun and stuck it under the officer's nose.

  The sergeant jumped up and pulled his gun at the same moment the two guards leveled their M-16s.

  "I am from the C, fucking I, fucking A. I am on contract. Figgy Meeks, retired agent of the CIA, was told by the di rector of the CIA to send someone here. If you want to be re sponsible for a bloodbath, you go ahead. I am ready to die. Are you?"

  The officer looked to his men, then back at Baptiste.

  "Don't think of me as French," Baptiste said, his tone softening. "Think of me as American. I work with Figgy Meeks. Figgy works with a man named Sam. Do you under stand?"

  The officer's eyes shifted again. "I have not heard of any Sam."

  "I don't believe that."

  "I need to call my commander."

  "There's the phone."

  The officer stepped to the sergeant's desk. He spoke rapid Turkish for a moment, then waited. There was more talk. Then they waited a long time, the officer still on the phone.

  "My colonel called the CIA. The CIA called this Figgy. Figgy says to prove you are Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste Sourriaux."

  Baptiste was sweating now in earnest. It was fear sweat, not heat sweat. It had finally sunk in-what he was doing here. The Turks were merciless.

  He handed his wallet to the officer.

  "Still, I am not satisfied," the Turk said at last. "Tell me the number of your office, Mr. French SDECE man."

  Baptiste gave it to him.

  'Tell me your boss's name."

  "Admiral Larive."

  The Turk raised his eyebrows.

  "The very one," Baptiste said, sweat trickling under his collar.

  The Turk dialed.

  "I want to speak with the admiral." He looked at Baptiste and seemed perplexed. "They say I need an appointment."

  "You will not get through to him like this."

  "Tell me, madame," the officer said. "You are familiar with Jean-Baptiste Sourriaux? Could you describe him for me?"

  There was a pause while the Turk listened.

  "I will hand the phone to him and maybe he can convince you. His manhood depends on it. So, if you don't want him back with no balls, you better figure out a way."

  "What does she say?"

  "They don't give descriptions of army officers."

  Baptiste took the phone.

  "Marie, this is Baptiste. You need to tell this man what I look like and what my wife looks like. He has a picture of my wife to compare."

  "How do I know it is really you and not a ruse?"

  "Ask me something."

  "Who does the admiral want to screw?"

  "The new office girl. The blonde with a flat stomach and no tits."

  "Put him back on."

  The Turk listened for two minutes, then hung up the phone and looked to Baptiste. Faster than Baptiste could register it, he'd slapped the gun out of his hand, and two of his men had grabbed him from behind. The officer's expression remained impassive.

  "If you ever pull a gun on a Turk again, I'll have you flayed alive." He nodded at the men, who released Baptiste. He put Baptiste's gun in his desk, then sat in the sergeant's chair. "We have already broken Alfawd. It was not a pretty sight. You can ask him whatever you want and he will tell you. He will suck your dick or give you his daughter if you want."

  Baptiste nodded.

  "Now get out of my sight."

  The soldiers escorted Baptiste down two flights of stairs and past agonized graffiti on bare concrete walls into the bone-dry, gritty hell of the lower level. It smelled of blood and excrement even before they reached the small, miser able cells. Alfawd was a spindly little man with his shirt off; he was covered in caked-on blood. Unfortunately for him, he had been convicted of corrupting Turkish officials in high places. Some of them would be tried and thrown in jail forever, while the luckier ones would skate. The Turks were angry at the instruments of their own corruption, and one of these instruments was chained naked to a chair and muttering about the afterlife.

  In the presence of two Turkish "investigators" and an Arabic translator, Baptiste was allowed to ask anything he wanted. The electrodes were still connected to the man's burned testicles.

  "You know a man who calls himself Gaudet, Girard, Jean Valjean, and a host of othe
r names, and who probably has French citizenship under some other name, and who is ru mored to live in Quatram, and who was rumored to have lived in French Polynesia? You know this man?" Baptiste spoke in French and the translator restated it in Arabic.

  Then the translator came back with the answer: "I have met with others and a man like that. I don't know if it is the same man."

  "He has some science that works magic on people's brains. You know about that?"

  "I have heard."

  "What did you hear?"

  "Not much. That he has a clever plan called Cordyceps. I have told this all before. I don't know much."

  One of the guards flipped a switch. The man bounced off the chair, arching his back and screaming in Turkish, saliva foaming at the mouth. He urinated a trickle onto the seat. As a conductor it exacerbated his misery until the guard stopped the flow of electricity.

  Baptiste flinched but only slightly. Alfawd choked and moaned incoherently.

  "You need to tell it again, but with more details. Last time you left things out," the Turkish interrogator said. "We will need to wait a couple minutes. He will be confused now and incoherent." They all sat as if they were waiting for a bus. For the Turk it was all in a day's work.

  "Tell us now about Gaudet."

  "This man you are calling Gaudet had a beard, wore a hat and sunglasses even though it was indoors. There was no way at all to tell what he looked like."

  Alfawd stopped for the translator and then the translator proceeded. "His body seemed normal, maybe five feet ten, but he was always sitting in my presence. He did not move. You could not tell his age, he was in the shadows, he spoke very quietly, and you had to strain to hear."

  "What is Cordyceps?"

  "Some sort of disease or fungus. It kills bugs by eating th em inside out. It is what he is going to do to the United States."

  "How?"

  "I don't know. That was for later. But the stock markets of the world would collapse. Prices would drop. He could not kill the United States forever, but for a while they would be hurt. Crippled."

  "How were you and Gaudet to make your money?"