“Hey, okay, I’ll take you to church.”
“I already told you”—her voice was sharp—“I don’t want to go to church.”
Okay, starting to get exasperated here. “Then what do you want?”
Silence.
I followed her down the hallway. Behind me, in the kitchen, the microwave cut off.
“What it is you want, Tessa?”
She turned to face me. “Just the truth. Okay? Alright?”
“Well… Good. I’m glad to hear that.”
“Yeah,” she said ambiguously. Then she disappeared into her room, leaving me standing there staring at her closed door.
She didn’t slam it. If she had, I might’ve thought she was just pouting and I could have discounted, at least somewhat, her little outburst. But she didn’t, and I realized that somewhere deep inside she really was searching for answers and all I’d managed to give her was more frustration.
Obviously she was upset, and trying to talk to her more was certainly an option, but over the last few years I’ve learned that there are times when it’s best to leave her alone — and often those are the times when I feel the most like I want to go and help her out. I had the sense that this was one of those times when I needed to give her some space.
I called to her that the spaghetti was done and she thanked me from the other side of the door, but when I waited for her to come out, she did not.
Finally, I put the plate in the fridge and returned to the hall. I paused when I came to her door, tried to sort out what I might say to her if I actually did knock on it, but in the end I passed by and simply went to my room instead.
Before going to bed I reviewed my schedule for tomorrow: in the morning I planned to look over the case files early, then visit Lien-hua before driving to NCAVC headquarters for the afternoon briefing.
In the meantime, more than anything I needed some sleep.
Even though it wasn’t quite nine thirty, I was exhausted, but now, with the case on my mind, as well as this little, somewhat disconcerting exchange with Tessa scratching away at my conscience, I wasn’t confident at all that I’d be able to quiet my mind enough to get the rest I really needed.
23
Keith did not enjoy what Vanessa had directed him to do to Eashan and Jagjeevan over the course of the last twelve hours.
Eashan had cried too much, which had annoyed Vanessa and caused her to instruct Keith to do more work on him than he would have liked. Jagjeevan had struggled too much for his own good and ended up worse off than he should have.
Both men were alive. But neither was fully intact.
Honestly, since she’d threatened to hurt them only if they didn’t get their job done, Keith wasn’t sure all of that was necessary. But he knew better than to second-guess Vanessa, and once she decided she wanted to make an example of someone — or simply to punish a person for her own private enjoyment — he knew there would be no changing her mind.
And, for fear of what their employer would do to him if he didn’t obey her, he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter and had followed her instructions to the letter.
Her aggressive attitude last night might have been her way of impressing the man who’d hired them and whom Keith had gotten the sense she had a relationship with — or at least wanted to have one with.
Regardless, in the end, Keith and Vanessa had accomplished what they’d come to India to do. The hologram had been redesigned. The women who were now coming in to work were already sending the boxes through the two printing machines.
Each of the printers could imprint one box every fifteen seconds, so, given forty-eight hours, that was more than enough time to package the ten thousand packets that were going to be shipped to America.
Keith and Vanessa’s flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until tomorrow evening.
“So what’s the plan?” he asked her. “Back to Chennai? Check on the paperwork for the shipment?”
“We’ll stay here for today, oversee things, then Baahir can take us back tomorrow morning. Maybe I’ll see if we can get on an earlier flight. Either way we should arrive in Boston with plenty of time to get ready for Thursday. We’ll need to be prudent about our steps from here on out. You know how he is if everything isn’t in order.”
Keith nodded soberly, realizing that what he had done to Eashan and Jagjeevan last night would be nothing compared to what would happen to him if he and Vanessa let down their employer, Alexei Chekov. “Yes.”
Chekov, who was better known under the alias “Valkyrie,” had worked as an assassin for Russia’s foreign military intelligence directorate, the GRU, before launching out on his own last spring.
It seemed that since then he’d found his real calling and had worked tirelessly to refine his skills.
He was wanted not only by Interpol for international terrorism and numerous assassinations, but also appeared on the FBI’s most-wanted-terrorists list with a five-million-dollar reward.
Keith had heard that Alexei used to have his own private code of ethics and never harmed women or children, but somewhere along the line he’d given that up and these days he was as ruthless with them as he was with the grown men who crossed him or let him down.
To call the Russian Mafia “ruthless” is like calling a sharks’ feeding frenzy a “meal.” And the Mafia was afraid of Alexei. To put it bluntly, when Alexei wanted something, he got it, and he wanted these drugs in the American pharmaceutical supply chain by this coming weekend. It was Keith and Vanessa’s job to make sure that happened.
The drug they were so concerned with was the same one Corey Wellington had taken for the seven days preceding his suicide.
As Keith remembered him, he thought about pressing his fingers against a dead person’s neck and feeling no pulse.
The cool skin. The unblinking eyes. The tongue that lolls to the side.
Every time Keith had felt for someone’s pulse, both in the States and in the slums of India where they’d done their initial trials, had been difficult for him.
From the tests he and Vanessa had done, a week, just like it had been for Corey, was the average time frame. It was almost always six to eight days, depending on the dosage, body size, and degree of depression that the test subject was suffering from.
With Corey, it’d happened abruptly. That was unusual, but it wasn’t unheard-of. Most people had gradual mental disorientation beforehand, but there were always those who simply woke up one day and decided on the spot to end it all.
Keith and Vanessa had watched Corey for nine days prior to his death. That’s why they’d copied his house key and placed the two hidden cameras in his house — to monitor his progress.
And it was why they’d switched his prescription medication packets with ones from the facility here in Kadapa, the ones with their own lot numbers on them, so they could better track and monitor their use by the test subjects.
During Corey’s last three days of life, they’d watched him every morning and evening on the video feed in the apartment they’d rented just down the street.
As far as Keith could tell, Vanessa hadn’t slept the whole time.
It was amazing. And a little unnerving.
Calydrole was prescribed only to people who had suicidal tendencies. In clinical studies it showed a remarkable ability to help steer depressed individuals away from those kinds of thoughts.
Taking an inert pill would have increased the likelihood of those thoughts recurring, simply because the person’s condition wasn’t being treated. But the drug that Dr. Kurvetek, a neuropathologist with an above-average sadistic streak, had helped Alexei develop, did more than just allow the thoughts to return. It activated the parts of the brain that facilitated self-destructive behavior in depressed individuals.