Dark Heart (DARC Ops Book 3) (22 page)

J
asper tapped
the side of the prince’s bed, his hand thudding lightly on the metal rail. “You have nothing to worry about,” he said in Arabic. “You’ll be in excellent hands.”

“God willing,” the prince said in English.

Jasper stepped away and found Mr. Awadi, nodding confidently to him.

But the prince’s handler didn’t look as confident. “He has everything in the world to worry about,” said Awadi. “By the looks of things here. What could happen next? Infection from a doctor who doesn’t wash his hands?”

Jasper smiled. “No.”

“Or maybe the doctor did
wash his hands, but the soap wasn’t soap and instead it was—”

“He’s a very lucky man,” Jasper interrupted. “To have made it this far . . . He has luck on his side.”

“He has God on his side,” said Mr. Awadi, closing his eyes and bowing his head.

“Allahu Akbar,” Prince Saif said weakly from his bed.

And then the room filled with a chorus of
Allahu Akbar
,
Allahu Akbar,
with all the Saudi guests joining in, the music of their appeals rising and falling like a round of cicadas. Jasper bowed politely and left the room as the last of the cicadas fizzled out.

“Jackson told me to talk to you.”

It was Sam, the super recognizer. He had his tie in his hands, rolling it around his finger like a little kid would.

“Talk to me about what?”

“About what to do,” said Sam. “I mean, I know what to do . . . but—”

“Have you gone over the whole roster?”

Jasper had created a yearbook-style page of everyone who would be present during the operation, all of their high-res color photos for Sam’s savant-like abilities to keep, organize, and recall. The prince didn’t need to have any strange faces in the operating room.

“I’m still waiting for the rest,” Sam said.

“That was it.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah,” said Jasper. “What, you wanted to show off?”

“I’m just used to a lot more faces.”

“Remind me to take your number when this is all done. I’ll take you to Vegas.”

Sam scratched at his temple. “Why Vegas?”

Jasper shrugged. “You know . . .”

“It doesn’t work for cards.”

“Oh. I thought, you know . . .”

“Can we get back on topic?”

“Yeah,” said Jasper. “We probably should.”

Sam looked around, crossed and then uncrossed his arms, and leaned close to Jasper. He whispered, “There’s been a gentleman.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve seen a gentleman quite frequently walking by the room, always looking in. And he seems very much out of place.”

Jasper checked the hall, both ways, although he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. He just knew that he felt a sudden creeping paranoia.

Sam kept up with the whispering. “For one, he shouldn’t necessarily be up here on this floor. I’ve found his photo in the security directory. He’s a lab technician. Victor Demidov.” Sam pulled a phone from his pocket and started thumbing the screen. “So, unless he’s got a sick friend or some nurse up here he keeps visiting . . .” Then Sam turned the phone to Jasper, showing a staff photo of Mr. Demidov. “Ever seen this guy?”

Squarish head. Widow’s peak. Upper lip that hung over the bottom.

“No.”

“He’s also out of place because of the way he moves,” said Sam. “The way he looks. His behaviors. Everything.”

“Is he Russian?”

Sam winced. “Is Victor Demidov Russian?”

“I mean,
how
Russian? Does he speak it?”

“I’ve never heard him speak.”

“Hmm.” Jasper tapped his foot. It was good timing, hearing about this lab technician.

“Well?” said Sam.

“I was just about to head down there. I’ve got some samples to analyze.”

“Yeah?” said Sam. “And?”

“Let me know if you see him around.”

“Yeah,” Sam grunted. “Anything else?” The guy had horrible social skills.

“Sure,” said Jasper. “What’s my body language saying?”

“You want to hit me.”

Jasper laughed. “You know, you’re pretty good at this.”

* * *

V
ictor Demidov was nowhere
to be found on the lab floor, so Jasper went ahead with his work, running tests on the contents of blood bags and IV solutions lined up for the surgery. There was no such thing as being too careful. Midway through the process, he got the call from Jackson about a thwarted entry into one of the building’s environmental control systems.

“Someone tried the password over a hundred times,” Jackson said. “In the old morgue.”

“That’s interesting.” Jasper’s eyes glanced through a chemical analysis of one of his samples. He had too much work to do.

“Interesting?”

He picked up another page, looking for the item number and then matching it with one of the blood bags. Check and recheck. “Can’t you get someone else? I’ve got these fluids to clear, and then I have to run them upstairs for the surgery.”

“You’re closer.”

“The surgery is closer. It’s in fifteen minutes.”

“The morgue is two floors below you,” said Jackson.

Jasper tossed one of the pages aside. “A rat walked across the keyboard.”

“A hundred times?”

“Two rats. They’re fucking.”

“Then I want to know what kind of rats they were,” said Jackson. “Go check on it.”

At that moment, no amount of password fails in an old basement morgue could distract him from what was most important—making sure that anything that might potentially be used or injected into the prince was safe and untampered with. However, the sight of Vic was a distraction that he couldn’t ignore. Jasper could see him in the corner of his eye, crisscrossing a hallway, rushing in and out of two rooms, their doors slamming shut each time. The lab technician looked just as he did in the photos, only more bug-eyed, pale and squirrely. And he was now pushing a trolley carrying several boxes, wheeling it quickly in and out of the rooms.

As Jasper finished up his current sample, he kept looking up at the latest door Vic had exited, waiting for Vic to return. When he was satisfied that he wouldn’t, Jasper made his way to the door with a casual stroll, like he not only belonged there in the lab, but that he belonged inside that very door.

Only he didn’t. It was locked.

“Hey, Jackson,” he said into his phone while reading the room number on a small placard near the door. “Any chance I can get access to LT303?”

“No,” said Jackson. “That’s not on the morgue level.”

A moment later, after some mild arguing with Jackson, and after Jasper’s swipe badge had been updated with an expanded allowance, and after that swipe badge triggered a green light above the lock, the door finally opened into a small, dim office. The lights were off, but there was a small desktop lamp which gave off a low reddish glow, giving Vic’s personal office the coziness of a bedroom. There were family photos on the desk, personalized knickknacks like Matryoshka doll paperweights and dog-eared concert tickets held up on a metal filing cabinet by takeout pizza magnets. There was also a harsh chemical smell. It reminded Jasper of the battlefield. A burnt-hair type smell. He found the source in the corner of the room, where several buckets and plastic soda bottles stood. There was foil folded over the tops of the bottles. It didn’t look like hospital lab work. It looked more like something from the pages of
The Anarchist’s Cookbook
.

Leaving the room and then quickly returning with a hypodermic needle and a sample vial, Jasper carefully collected a small sample of the dark, noxious liquid. He brought it out of the dark office and into the brightly lit, sterile lab area, and to his current workstation where he pushed aside his blood samples to make room for a potentially more important experiment.

Before entering the sample into the analysis machine, Jasper tried a low-fi, human analysis first, wafting the vial near his face and taking a slow, careful inhalation through his nose.

Ammonia.

He put down the vial and turned off the machine, capping the syringe and pocketing it before heading back to Vic’s lair of an office. The analysis machine would take more time than he had. His time, that narrow sliver of minutes between blood samples and checking on some computer in the morgue, only allowed for blind and unscientific rummaging through drawers and boxes. He started with a wire metro rack, checking for containers of whatever chemicals Vic had been mixing. Ammonia nitrate, perhaps. Nitroglycerin. Something obvious that would just scream the intentions of a bomb-making terrorist. But it was all harmless stuff. Old binders of chemical analysis sheets, hypoallergenic latex gloves, card stock, old takeout menus.

In a shoebox he found a bunch of loose nails, the box almost half full of them, loose, heavy, and sliding around. Why would a lab technician have so many nails? For the family portraits on his office wall? Or for stuffing into small lengths of pipe as shrapnel?

Jasper tried to put the office back to how he’d found it, but gave up the process when Jackson called again. There was more activity in the morgue. He should have been on his way there. Where the hell was he?

But Jasper changed the subject. “Jackson? Do we have bomb-sniffing dogs?”

There was a slight pause from Jackson. And then he said, “Not yet.”

S
he might die in there
. Starvation. Dying in a morgue. She thought about the pointlessness of it, the arc of her life. The victories, disappointments. Everything, good or bad, which had led her to this exact spot, huddled against the wall in a morgue autopsy room. The location for countless autopsies, for innumerable revelations of each cadaver’s cause of death. Mysteries released through the cutting of skin and bone.

What would be her cause? Lack of water? Lack of sunlight?

Or perhaps lack of oxygen, the old musty air of the sealed autopsy room becoming increasingly stuffy and noxious. And maybe even toxic. There were cleaning solutions, the harshest of them still remaining after months. There were perhaps embalming and preserving fluids. Maybe that was how she’d die, being preserved alive, her body pickling itself so that not even rats would be interested in the snack.

She had tried the computer again, not exactly sure of what she’d done. She hoped the login was for something important, something that could attract attention. She tried digging further, trying to access something more sensitive than temperature controls, when she felt the floor rumble gently beneath her feet. There was the sound of distant thunder. And then silence.

She’d been at work for hundreds of storms in the past, but none of the thunder sounded—or felt—like this. Granted, she hadn’t been locked away in a basement. She tried to imagine the outside world, beyond the hospital, the wind rushing through trees and overturned leaves, the sky darkening, the air cooling. Another ripple of thunder helped Fiona picture the scene on the street, the wind whipping through narrow valleys of skyscrapers, pedestrians rushing about to safety under awnings or some umbrellas, before a wall of rain swept in.

She sat back down against the wall, imagining the rain. How it might feel on her bare face if she were only a few dozen feet further up. Or if she were a few years younger, back in Iowa, before the necessity for work took hold of her life, and before her sister’s terrible accident took hold of hers. A time when they’d rush out into the street together, into the rain, stomping in puddles, the sky darkening above, the night approaching . . .

Just as Fiona had imagined the place where she was reunited with her sister, the old Iowa home or perhaps the afterlife, the lights in the morgue flickered out. And she was alone again. No more rain, or puddles, or rumbling thunder. Just a dark room without her sister. For the rest of her life.

What was there to do, other than just sit there against the wall? She’d already tried everything she could in the light. Now in the dark she felt as close as ever to a contentment. A quiet resignation. And something else, something cool and otherworldly. A feeling of death, washing over her. It was an icy touch, as if somebody from the operating table had reached over and draped a wet and frail hand down to her shoulder. Or some ghost, her sister perhaps, returning to her, sitting next to her.

And then talking to her.

Get up.

A voice from deep inside her, a vibration gurgling up through her spine and into her brain stem, buzzing there like a trapped bee.

Get up and get ready.

She could feel
the message more than hear it, its intent welling up into her skull until she felt the pressure, a great force trying to explode out of her forehead.

Get up!

Fiona got up.

She walked forward, freely. No hands in front to protect her, no wondering where she was in the dark room. She walked directly to the operating table, her hand sliding out through the darkness until she felt the hard metal rim of the paint can. And then the handle. She gripped it, and then lifted the paint can off the table, the weight of it rocking back and forth. A nice, full can. She liked how heavy it felt, moving her arms, letting it swing back and forth with its tiny metal squeaking sounds.

Use it.

She could use it. Paint a little picture in the dark, something desperate and primal and on the wall like cave markings. “I was here.” Or she could keep all the paint inside, every useful ounce of it, every bit of weight behind whatever swing was necessary against whatever foe . . .

When she heard the sound of an elevator door shutting, she knew she’d made the right decision—not only in grabbing the paint can, but in holding in every bit of its weight. She would need everything she could muster.

With the can dangling and swinging, Fiona rushed to where she knew the door was. She had been in the room long enough for the mental picture to stick, burning into her mind like the after-effects of staring at some bright light that had just gone out, the room and its dimensions existing in her mind as easily as if she had night-vision goggles. Her wit and concentration had been collected, her thoughts quieted and streamlined, her will immovable, her grip tightening on the paint can handle as she waited against the wall. She was standing where the door would swing open, her foot sticking out so that she could feel just exactly where it was, so she could know exactly when and where to lean out around the door and swing the paint can with as much force as she could.

The sounds in the hall grew louder as her body stiffened, her muscles aching with adrenaline. She was no longer the meek victim, but an ice-veined predator, the throbbing embodiment of vengeance. And she wanted her attacker to return. Come try the door. Come try her.

Footsteps grew louder. Slower, as if thoughts got in the way of someone’s pace. A hesitant approach to the door.

The sound, the person, her potential enemy, had stopped. A ray of light shone into the room under the door. A flashlight. She instinctively edged closer to her wall, backing up against it, careful not to touch paint can to brick. Careful not to breathe so loudly. Careful.

The light disappeared.

Everything went dark and quiet, and it stayed that way for so long that Fiona began to wonder if her visitor was still there. But an invisible blast confirmed the unfriendly presence, an explosion of metal splinters and rushing air, the door swinging out and slamming against Fiona—her nose taking most of it—and squeezing her into the wall briefly before bouncing back off her and clamoring to the ground.

Her face stung horribly and it felt like her nose was missing. It felt wet. And then she stopped thinking and feeling anything, instead hearing someone’s feet step onto the fallen door with two deep clunking sounds. The light flicked on again, its beam dragging across the far wall with the countertop and the cupboards, and then around the corner and onto Fiona’s wall. As it swept closer to her corner, she made her decision.

Swing!

It started with Fiona’s back foot, her planting it firmly against the corner of the floor and wall, an energy propelling out through her leg and into her hip, swinging back with the windup of her arm, the paint can reaching back and then hurtling forward through the darkness. The can swung out from the handle at full extension, the weight of it all moving at full velocity with hardly a sound until it came to a dead stop—and a sickeningly meaty thud, a wet sound, a sound of bone. And then a man’s scream as the can bounced back, as Fiona pulled it back behind her, preparing for another mighty swing. Midway back, just as she was about to come forward with yet another blow onto whatever body part she could hit, she was blinded by the searing ray of her attacker’s flashlight.

And then the horrifying thought occurred to her that it hadn’t been an attacker, but a rescuer. Jasper, whom she had called out and wished for. He had come busting down the door as she hoped, and received a paint can to the head for his trouble.

She felt his hands on her, harder and stronger than before, grabbing her like a mixed-martial artist would grapple his opponent. The hands ran down to her wrists, squeezing there and pushing her arm back against the wall, squeezing the soft tendons with such a painful grip that her fingers instantly released the paint can. It came crashing down at her feet, spilling its slow wetness all over her feet. Now she was clawing for him, for any piece of his face, punching madly with a hateful, open-handed ferocity. A few swats landed, but they were onto the meat of his shoulder, her blows landing in quiet, futile thuds. His arms, meanwhile, wrapped around her neck, his forearms tightening like some great python, coiling up around her windpipe, choking, and then dragging her through the room. Her legs kicked wildly as she fought for grip on the ground, as she tried to leverage any kind of footing, any kind of resistance to his dragging.

Through the struggle, her throat tightened in his grip, the air passing through more loudly and laboriously now as he lifted her trifling weight off the ground, leaning her body over his so that she had nothing but him to grab on to. Nothing but this strong, silent mass, this animal working on the lowest of instincts. No words, just flexed muscle working against her, lifting her, dragging, squeezing her away.

He stepped over the door, his feet fumbling over it for a few steps, and then they were out in the hallway, the sound of her struggles echoing differently against the narrow brick. She tried to grab hold of what she thought was a door frame, but his free arm, swinging like a club, knocked it away. Now, out in the hall, there was nothing to grab on to.

One consolation was that she was out of the morgue, a goal she’d had for what seemed like an eternity. She was away from the disgusting floor drain and the operating table. The hallway was still dark, but a light had turned on, a headlamp fixed atop her attacker’s face. So at least she could see again, watching the details of the hallway’s cracked-paint brick, the bare shiny concrete below where they’d removed the floor tiles. And the set of scuffed-metal double doors they were approaching.

A new sense of panic set in as he steered her toward the double doors, grunting and panting in the warm, stuffy air. She could feel his sweat, his forearm becoming slippery as he dragged her closer and closer to the doors. It reminded her of a set of doors she’d seen in her childhood, at her father’s old downtown butcher shop, the scuffed doors of the meat cooler. She could see her dad, in his blood-stained apron, carrying various cuts of meat in and out of the swinging doors. Now it was she who was the piece of meat, a carcass being dragged in for storage.

Storage.

The thought made her kick even harder, screaming as she tried her best to dig her heels into any soft part of his body. She aimed for his crotch, kicking backward, squirming hard against his body, writhing like a snake in sets of violent, whip-like kicks. But his grip was hard and tight, swinging her body around to face the door, and then slamming her into it, using her like a ram to split open the heavy doors.

She thought the air in the old morgue was stale enough, but inside this new room it was even worse. Like a tomb that had been sealed up for a few millenniums. And despite the caustic odors of bleach and industrial cleaners, there was still that sweet, disgusting hint of death. Fiona only hoped she wouldn’t soon add to it.

Still scrambling against his body, her hands were back at his face. She tried clawing at the lit headlamp, preferring darkness over whatever she’d have to see next. But he kept batting her hand away, and before long she was looking at the light’s harsh reflection against the stainless-steel doors of the morgue’s freezers. She screamed hysterically, but it was simultaneously choked off by his arm and muffled by his hand. She tried biting that hand. She tried kicking again, this time landing a solid blow to his crotch, which puffed the wind out of him. He muttered a string of curse words as he readjusted his grip, holding her firmer, walking faster, and then hunching over to open one of the drawers.

“No!” Fiona howled, kicking, thrashing against him.

He’d turned her around, away from the cooler, but she could hear a loud, horrifying squealing sound of one of its drawers being pulled out. And as he bent her horizontally, she fought one last time, one last spasm to try to break free. And then one last breath, as he stuffed her body into one of the cool metal drawers.