Do I hear a second?"
"David, don't hurt us," Eric said, rolling onto his side. "It won't help anything to hurt us."
"Says you," Subarsky mumbled, peering through the downpour as he sorted through a sophisticated-looking ring of keys and oddly bent wires. "Why, just wrecking my flashlight the way you did carries the goddam death penalty."
"David, please…"
"Now just shut up, little fella. Sit back in your puddle, enjoy the last few moments of your earthbound existence, and watch a master locksman at work. Believe it or not, these beauties were made by one of the engineering students at M.I.T He sold them for a thousand bucks a set, and was ready to retire by the time he graduated. There's nothing they can't open."
He selected one of the keys, examined it, and then gently inserted it into the opening at the base of the padlock. Although there was a brand name of some sort die-stamped onto the oddly shaped padlock, it had become known around Plan B as the Scottlock, out of deference to Scott Enders, who had designed it. The actual keyhole was well concealed beneath a small sliding panel at the top of the apparatus.
The keyhole at the bottom was another piece of business altogether.
As Dave Subarsky worked the key he had selected in up to its hilt, the metal tip completed an electrical circuit between a tiny lithium battery and a wire-enclosed plastic capsule. In seconds the heat from the wire had melted the plastic, releasing a single large drop of concentrated hydrochloric acid.
Subarsky was dramatically humming a fragment of Bach's Concerto No. 2 in E, and gently jiggling the key, when the hydrochloric acid first touched the wad of chemically treated plastique explosive wadded into the base of the lock. He was bending over, peering at the keyhole, when the apparatus exploded.
Eric watched in stunned horror as, in an instant, both of Subarsky's hands and a good portion of his face were blown away.
Bellowing insanely, pawing at the remains of his eyes, he stumbled backward. He was still on his feet after absorbing a blast powerful enough to have actually blown a large hole in the metal door.
Eric rolled over in time to see Subarsky, still shrieking incoherently, reel blindly past the Saab and onto Meridian Avenue. The driver of the oncoming sixteen-wheeler, high on cocaine he had bought from a dealer in Cambridge, never saw the figure lurch out of the shadows and onto the road; nor did he feel the impact when the reinforced steel grille-guard of the truck slammed into the man full force.
What remained of the genius biochemist's right arm became entangled in the metal grate as the semi roared on through the rain.
The young driver, immersed in a Guns and Roses tape, sang along as he drove, unaware of the huge, grotesque ornament suspended just below the Mack bull dog on his hood.
Fighting the rain and a sudden profound exhaustion, Eric took nearly fifteen minutes to work free of his bonds. Then, using a rock, he smashed in the passenger window of the Saab. A minute later, he and Laura were inside the trailer. The video receiver was on a crate in the front left corner. It was enclosed in an oilskin sack, and its wire antenna had been brought out through a tiny hole drilled in the trailer wall.
"Here," Eric said, handing the tape over. "I think you should be the one to Turn this in."
"That lock was the second time today that Scott's saved my life," Laura said.
They huddled together in the it" eras she told him about finding her brother, their subsequent capture and escape, and Scott's death.
She eluded Lester Wheeler and his men by swimming underwater from one pier to the next. Finally, nearly unconscious from the cold, she had stumbled up the bank and onto the roadway. An elderly woman and her husband, on their way home from the market, had picked her up and brought her to their home.
"I've got a bit of a story to tell you, too," Eric said, "but unless I get some dry clothes on soon, I may end up getting pneumonia and being taken to White Memorial Hospital. And we all know what happens to people who are brought there."
"Not anymore it doesn't," Laura said. She jumped off the trailer and helped him to follow.
EPILOGUE
The ten-seat Leariet swooped down through the cloudless midmorning sky like a falcon, leveling off sharply at 2,000 feet. Inside the cabin, five passengers pressed their foreheads against the windows and peered through the glare across the stark San Rafael Desert, each one anxious to catch a first glimpse of Charity, Utah.
"We've sighted the town, Mr. Harten," the pilot said over the intercom.
"About five miles ahead at ten o'clock. We've been cleared into Moab, so if it's okay with you, I'll make a couple of passes at this altitude and then head over to the airport."
Within three hours of receiving Laura's call at his home in Laurel, Virginia, the head of Communigistics International had the government-owned jet on the ground at Boston's Logan Airport. By 7:30 A.M. the Lear was airborne once again, streaking west. Sharing the cabin with Neil Harten were an associate of his from Plan B named Thorsen, plus Eric, Laura, and Maggie Nelson.
Twenty-five hundred miles away, they knew, Bernard Nelson lay unconscious, hooked to a ventilator in the intensive care unit of the hospital in Utah. And from what Eric had learned from his conversation with the attending physician, the detective's condition was not good.
Their odyssey had begun with an early-morning phone call to Maggie Nelson from a man named Smith in Moab. From what she could tell, her husband had succeeded in finding and penetrating the facility at Charity, Utah, only to be poisoned by the head of the operation there, a physician named Barber. Details of Nelson's subsequent rescue by a Charity employee named Pike were sketchy, but apparently Barber had been shot and wounded in the process, and another employee killed.
Although he was conscious when the ambulance arrived at the town, during the ride to Moab, Bernard had slipped into a coma.
Maggie Nelson's first move had been to call Laura at Bernard's Boston apartment.Now, the travelers stared down in awed silence at the fantastic scene below. The town, barely a smudge on the massive landscape, was surrounded by police cruisers and ambulances. Dozens of people were milling about along the single main street. Others lay on stretchers outside a low cinder-block building.
The pilot made two wide swings overhead, giving those on each side of the aircraft a good look. Then he banked to the east and shot across the rugged desert toward Moab. Seated next to Gil Harten at the rear of the plane, Eric briefed him on what he knew of the poison tetrodotoxin.
With the intervention of Haven Darden, the hospital administration had allowed Eric to search the offices of Dave Subarsky and Norma Cullinet.
In a locked box in the nurse's desk, he found a number of ampules of intravenous adrenaline. He also retrieved two of what appeared to be baby-food jars, each about half-filled with a coarse grayish powder. One had a small stick-on label reading simply "T."; and the other, D.
When confronted with the find, and a brief explanation of his daughter's role in the Charity Project, Haven Darden picked up the phone and asked Eric to wait in the corridor outside his hospital room.
After just a few minutes, he called him back inside.
"My daughter says that the powder labeled 'T' is what we suspected," he said. There was great sadness in his eyes, but also undisguised relief in his voice that Rebecca had agreed to cooperate.
"The other is some sort of substance to reverse the effects of the toxin. Rebecca says that the dose of the antidote is between two and five grams, and that her cohorts had been dissolving it in saline and administering it intravenously. They also used large doses of adrenaline, but she has no idea of the amount. Most of the work was done in the monitoring room at the mortuary.