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“Needless to say, the same consequence will result if you say
anything to the police. In fact, if you tell anyone about our meeting other than your involved friend, you and everyone I named will be killed. Is that perfectly clear?”

Lynn nodded. She wasn’t sure she could speak.

“And one more thing,” Darko said. “After we are finished, I want you to leave this house and not come back.”

“Why?” Lynn asked, finding her voice.

“You are not in a position to ask questions,” Darko said. “Just do it.”

“But I need to feed the cat,” Lynn said. She pointed to the sleeping pet.

With a sidelong glance, Darko raised the pistol in his hand, aimed, and fired. There was a concussive hiss, and Pep’s body jolted. The cat raised her head briefly before collapsing.

“Feeding the cat is no longer a requirement,” Darko said.

Lynn’s lower jaw had dropped open. She couldn’t believe that this goon had just shot the cat.

“Enough!” Darko said. “Time for fun.” He confidently laid the pistol on the desk before walking back toward the sofa. About three feet away he stopped. “Now I want you to take off that bathrobe.”

A jolt went through Lynn’s body. This awful episode was not over. Afraid he would hit her again if she didn’t comply, she slowly untied the belt and then slipped her arms out of the robe, letting it puddle around her waist so that it still covered the lower half of her body. As she did this, she kept her eyes glued to the leering eyes of the intruder, fearing the worst. The man was disturbingly unpredictable, with lightning-fast reflexes and overwhelming strength, and she worried he would explode at any second if he sensed any resistance whatsoever. As a consequence she felt totally helpless, which was a new feeling for her. In the past, when she had pondered what she would do in a circumstance of potential sexual assault like she was now facing, she had thought that her own strength, athleticism, and years of kickboxing lessons would help. Now she no longer entertained the delusion. The man had her completely cowed, and
it was apparent he knew, as he was secure enough to have to put the gun down.

“All the way!” Darko commanded, arms akimbo.

Lynn reluctantly opened the robe across her lap and pulled it aside. She was now completely naked. Despite the ski mask, she could tell the despicable man was smiling.

“Now,” Darko said. “I want you to give me head!”

Wednesday, April 8, 12:07
A.M.

W
ith a feeling of overwhelming disgust, Lynn tensed her muscles to move forward off the couch with the intent of getting to her knees. All sorts of things were flashing through her mind, such as making a mad dash for the gun or butting the man in the groin with her head or even biting off the tip of his penis, but she knew she would do nothing, out of pure fear for her life.

Suddenly a high, piercing scream shattered the silence, making Lynn think she was about to jump out of her skin. She blinked by reflex and raised her arms to fend off a blow, but she wasn’t hit. Instead the intruder shot forward and plowed into her, crushing her against the back of the couch. The man’s arms had shot out on either side of Lynn to break his fall. A grunt of air escaped from his mouth.

For a few seconds Lynn couldn’t move or even breathe for the sheer weight of the writhing mass bearing down on her. In the next instant she realized she was being pressed against the back of the couch by two men, not one, and there was a mad scramble for dominance. Someone had rushed into the room and tackled the intruder.

Darko, too, had been caught from behind totally by surprise. With his extensive training and combat experience he knew that he was dealing with someone his own size or even larger. Using his honed martial arts skills, he was able to break the hold the attacker had around his chest as he and his attacker rolled off the couch and fell onto the floor. In the next second he was on his feet, but so was the attacker, who came at him again. This time the attacker had him face-to-face in a bear hug, and with his legs pumping, he drove Darko back against the wall of the room. Darko could now see that he was right. The man was bigger and more muscular. And he was black. But there was a good side: it was apparent the man was untrained in martial arts, as he was relying only on his body mass and strength.

To Lynn’s shock, it was Michael! Oblivious to her nakedness, Lynn leaped from the couch and rushed for the desk. She had never handled a gun, but didn’t care. Reaching the desk, she snapped up the pistol with both hands, slipping her right index finger into the trigger guard. Spinning around, she pointed the gun at the two struggling men and ran over to a point several paces away.

“Stop!” Lynn shouted.

The men ignored her. They were momentarily locked in an embrace and strained against each other. Michael had Darko’s arms pinned to his sides.

“Stop!” Lynn shouted yet again. To get their attention she fired the gun, unprepared and surprised by its recoil. She had aimed at a framed print hanging on the wall and had scored a direct hit. The combination of the suppressed sound of the gun and the tinkle of the shattered glass made the men pause. Michael let go of his hold on Darko.

Darko responded like the professional he was. He delivered a sharp karate blow to Michael and in the next instant disarmed Lynn with a fearsome kick. His foot hit the pistol with such force that the gun shot up and glanced off the ceiling. It ended up near the
fireplace with a clatter, snapping off the silencer. In the next instant Darko was gone.

It had all happened so fast that for a second both Lynn and Michael were too stunned to move or even talk. They merely stared at each other. Michael was the first to recover, and he flew out of the room in pursuit. Lynn was momentarily frozen in place, holding her numbed hand with the other.

Within seconds Michael was back. “He’s gone,” he said breathlessly. Lynn threw herself at him, sobbing in relief. The fact that she was naked didn’t even occur to her.

“Hold off, girl!” Michael said. He pulled Lynn’s arms from around his neck and immediately went for the gun. As he did so, Lynn went for the bathrobe that was crumbled in a heap on the couch.

Michael snatched up the gun and checked the magazine. There were still plenty of rounds available. He unscrewed the broken portion of the silencer and tossed it aside. He could tell the gun was operable.

Lynn rushed over and again enveloped him in an embrace. For a full minute she just held on to him and again cried. After what she had been through, she thought Michael was heaven sent. A miracle.

“It’s okay,” Michael soothed. His heart was pounding in his chest. His breathing was returning to a semblance of normal.

Finally Lynn leaned back so that she could look Michael in the eye. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you,” she repeated. “How did you know I was in trouble?”

“I didn’t,” Michael admitted. “But I wasn’t willing to take the risk to let you stay here alone. You were really stressed out on the phone. I called you right back as soon as I got rid of Vlad, but your phone immediately went to voice mail. Considering how stressed out you sounded, I suppose I thought the worst, like maybe you’d do something to yourself. I don’t know. I didn’t agonize. I ran over to the hospital and jumped in a cab.”

“Thank God you did. But how did you know to come storming in here?”

“That was easy. When I got to the front door, I could see someone busted in.”

“That asshole was about to rape me!” Lynn said angrily, fighting back more tears. “You were in the nick of time.”

“Do you have any idea who he is?”

“I don’t! I couldn’t see his face under that mask. But I can tell you one thing that might not be a surprise. He had a goddamned Russian accent.”

“Why would that not surprise me?” Michael asked. He was confused.

“Wait till I tell you why he came in here and scared the hell out of me. But first let’s get the fuck out of here in case he or any of his buddies come back. I imagine he is pretty pissed at you for interrupting his fantasy, the prick. He was going to make me give him a blow job.”

“We are not going to call the police?”

“Hell no!” Lynn said. “This is all a lot bigger than a breaking-and-entering or even rape. I have a lot to tell you, but first, let me get my clothes. Come with me! I don’t want to be alone. And bring the gun.”

Lynn rushed back to the master bath, where she’d left her things, and dressed rapidly.

Michael followed close behind. He kept hold of the gun dangling at his side. “If we don’t report this, we might be considered accessories after the fact,” he said. “I just want you to know. And this gun might be hot.”

“At this point I couldn’t care less,” Lynn said. Then, as she slipped on her shoes, she added: “Did you see Carl’s poor cat in the club chair?”

“No, why?”

“The bastard shot the cat for no reason,” Lynn said. “He killed the poor thing!”

“Probably to intimidate you.”

“Well, it worked. The guy’s a narcissistic sociopath, loud and clear, that much I can tell you. He bragged about how many people he has killed.”

“Should I call a taxi?”

“No! I don’t want to wait around for a cab. We’ll take Carl’s Cherokee. I’ll get it back here in a day or so. But before we leave I want to put the study back together and get the poor cat out of the house. There shouldn’t be any evidence of a struggle. And what about the front door?”

“What do you mean?”

“How bad is it? Will it close?”

“It’s off one of its hinges and the jamb is split near the striker plate,” Michael said, “but I think we can get it to close.”

“It just has to look okay,” Lynn said.

“Wait a sec,” Michael added. For the first time he noticed Lynn’s lip laceration and the welt on her cheek. “He hurt you, the bastard. Let me see!”

Lynn waved him off. “It’s nothing. Let’s clean up the place and get the hell out of here!”

Wednesday, April 8, 12:37
A.M.

M
ichael and Lynn lost little time getting out of the house. Dealing with the study had been easy. They picked up the broken glass, doctored the bullet hole in the print so that it wasn’t visible except up close, and righted the frame on the wall. After a short discussion, they put Pep in a double trash bag with the idea of finding a garbage can or a Dumpster to get rid of it. Lynn was squeamish about the choice but couldn’t think of anything else in the press of time. The front door had been more of a challenge, but with Lynn pulling from the inside and Michael pushing from the outside, they got it back into its jamb and secure. It was literally wedged into place. Lynn had to use the back door to get out. They met up at the garage.

With Lynn feeling shaky from her ordeal, she was happy to take Michael up on his offer to drive. Several blocks away at a construction site, they found a convenient Dumpster. At the last minute the gun and the broken silencer went into the trash bag with the cat. They were relieved to have gotten rid of it all.

As soon as they started north, Lynn filled him in on what had
happened. “The goon threatened to kill me,” she said to begin, trying to keep herself calm. Merely thinking about the episode got her heart racing all over again. She twisted in her seat to be able to look directly at Michael. The headlights of the oncoming traffic shining through the windshield played across his face. “Actually, he threatened to kill us both.”

Michael shot her a surprised look. “He said my name?”

“He didn’t say your name. To be exact he said, ‘You and your friend have pissed off a lot of people in high places.’”

“He actually said ‘people in high places’?”

“Those were his exact words. He said we, ‘will kill you and your friend if you don’t leave the investigation of Carl’s case to the hospital authorities and go back to being full-time medical students.’ Well, maybe those weren’t his exact words, but pretty damn close.”

“And he said ‘we,’ not ‘I,’ when he was talking about killing us?”

“Absolutely.”

“Terms like ‘people in high places’ and the pronoun ‘we’ make this sound more and more like a fucking major conspiracy.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Lynn said. “We’ve stumbled onto a hornets’ nest. And my tête-à-tête with the goon got worse. He threatened killing my mother and my sisters if we went to the police. He even knew their names and where they were. That takes resources and connections.”

“Did he include me at that point?”

“Yes! Your family, too!” Lynn shook her head in disbelief that this was all happening. She turned around and faced forward in her seat. They were nearing the commercial center of historic Charleston. Lynn looked at the revelers, surprised at how many there were despite the hour. She wished her life were so simple.

“So that’s why you didn’t want to call the police?”

“Partially. The other reason is that uncovering whatever this conspiracy is all about certainly is a hell of a lot more important than nabbing this single shit-ass psychopath. The idea of ‘people in
high places’ being involved blows me away. Something major is in the works, and I think it concerns Sidereal Pharmaceuticals with its Russian connection, and you know how I feel about pharmaceutical companies.”

“I know you are not a fan,” Michael said.

“That’s putting it mildly, whereas I actually hate them,” Lynn said with enough venom to cause Michael to glance over at her.

“Brang it on, woman! Wow! You’re big-time wound up about the drug business. What’s the beef?”

“Where to start?” Lynn said. She sighed and looked back at Michael. “I know we agree on the basics from conversations we’ve had in the past, like the pharmaceutical industry’s hypocrisy. They want people to think their motivation is for the public good when they are, in fact, poster boys for capitalism run amok.”

“You mean how they justify their out-of-the-ballpark prices supposedly because of how much money they have to spend on research.”

“You got it!” Lynn said with disgust. “The reality is that they spend more money on advertising prescription drugs directly to the public than they spend on research. And that doesn’t even include the money they spend on lobbyists and politicians.”

“We agree on all that,” Michael said. “But I’m sensing a lot more emotion here on your part.”

“Did I ever tell you that my father died because he couldn’t afford the medication that would have kept him alive?”

“No, you haven’t,” Michael said, taken aback. Michael knew that Lynn, like him, was never completely open about her childhood, but, considering all their discussions about medical care, he was surprised she had never shared this information about her father’s death.

“That’s right!” Lynn snapped, staring out through the windshield. “To stay alive he had to take the drug for the rest of his life, and it costs almost a half million dollars a year. It’s obscene.”

“Really?” Michael asked. “There’s a drug that costs five hundred thousand dollars a year?”

“It’s a monoclonal antibody, or biologic, like the drozitumab you saw on the front of Ashanti’s record. My father lost his job in the 2008 subprime catastrophe and ultimately his health insurance. He died because we couldn’t afford to pay for the drug.”

“That sucks,” Michael said. “Big-time!”

“Tell me about it! Anyway, I’m thinking Sidereal is doing something damning, maybe using people in the Shapiro for clinical trials, like we said. Yet somehow it seems overkill to me for us to get death threats for that unless they are somehow behind these anesthesia disasters.”

“You mean to create more subjects?” Michael asked, aghast at the idea.

“I know, it sounds too dastardly to even think about, but who’s to know? The only way I can think of possibly finding out is going into the Shapiro. If nothing else, once we are in there, I can use one of the terminals in the network operations center where you visited and look at their data. Of course that brings up the question of how you did tonight with your buddy Vladimir.”

Michael chuckled. “It was a slammin’ good time. Really, the guy’s got a good vibe and a good heart. He even brought me a souvenir, like he promised. I got to show it to you. It’s called a
matryoshka
doll. There’s one inside the other for about fifteen dolls, the last being a tiny thing.”

“Did you get the Shapiro scrubs?” Lynn asked, totally uninterested in the doll.

“No problem. We have two, just like you wanted, including hats and masks.”

“One set will be enough,” Lynn said. “I’m thinking I should go in by myself. This whole affair is getting more and more serious and risky. I think it is my battle, because of Carl.”

“We’ve been over this,” Michael said. “Case closed! We both go or neither of us goes.”

“We’ll see,” Lynn said. “How about the thumbprint?”

“I’m sure I got that, too. He had a couple of beers, and I was careful with the bottles. There should be plenty of prints.”

“Excellent,” Lynn said. They passed the ramp that led up to the Ravenel Bridge to Mount Pleasant. It was marked by a large overhead traffic sign. The name of the town reminded her of the horrific home invasion that they had learned about from the TV in the surgical lounge. The mother had been a patient at the Mason-Dixon Medical Center and had been diagnosed with a blood protein abnormality. All at once, the confusing gammopathy issue came back into her overstressed mind.

“There’s another aspect of all this that troubles me,” Lynn said, trying to organize her thoughts. She still felt shaky and discombobulated from what she had been through with the Russian goon. “It’s this gammopathy stuff. It keeps popping up. Before that bastard broke in, I learned something curious that I can’t explain. Remember those stats I got down in the IT office about the discharge diagnosis of gammopathy and multiple myeloma from the Mason-Dixon Med Center?”

“I remember,” Michael said. “But not the actual numbers.”

“The actual numbers don’t matter,” Lynn said. “The significant issue is that the number of people on discharge with these two diagnoses is five times the national average. Five times!”

Michael nodded as he considered what Lynn had just told him, but he didn’t say anything.

“Doesn’t that surprise you?” Lynn asked. She couldn’t believe he was seemingly taking it in stride.

“It surprises me,” Michael said. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that the number of people coming into our hospital with an unrelated illness and leaving with a diagnosis of a blood serum abnormality is five times the national average?”

“That’s exactly what I am saying. And to make it more confusing, most of these patients are relatively young, in their thirties and forties, whereas gammopathy usually appears in an older population, like people in their sixties.”

“And patients with a discharge diagnosis of multiple myeloma is five times more common in our hospital.”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Okay, how do you explain it?”

“I don’t,” Lynn snapped. “That’s why I’m bringing it up, for Chrissake.”

“Okay, keep it cool, girl,” Michael said calmly. “We’re on the same team here.”

“Sorry,” Lynn said. She took a deep breath to calm down.

“Is discovering this gammopathy and multiple myeloma info what had you ‘totally unglued’ and upset when you called me earlier?”

“Oh my gosh, no!” Lynn blurted. She swung back around to face Michael, thumping her forehead with her knuckles in mock punishment. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you my most important discovery. The anesthesia records show that in all three cases the tracing had been looped.”

Michael shot a quick glance at Lynn to make sure she wasn’t jerking him around. “Looped, as in being played over and over?”

“Exactly,” Lynn said, with her voice reflecting her sudden excitement. “From the moment of the frame offset in each record, the records were looped with the minute prior to that point, when everything was normal. It means that from the frame offset until the low-oxygen alarm sounded, the anesthesia machine wasn’t recording the patient’s real-time vital signs. Those signals were interrupted, and the looping was giving the false impression that everything was normal.”

“That’s serious shit,” Michael said.

“The question is, could it be a software glitch?”

“I can’t imagine,” Michael said. “It has to be a hack job, and if it is, who’s doing it and why? Holy shit!”

“It has to be all tied together,” Lynn said.

“What do you mean?” Michael asked. He turned into the hospital grounds and headed for the multilevel garage.

“What’s going on in Anesthesia has to be connected somehow with the protein abnormalities.”

“That seems far-fetched,” Michael said.

“I thought so at first. But remember what we learned last year in diagnostics: even when symptoms seem entirely unrelated, they are almost invariably part of the same underlying disease. My intuition tells me we are going to find the same here with the abnormal proteins and the anesthesia disasters.”

“If they are associated, I can’t think how,” Michael said.

“Nor can I,” Lynn admitted. “I might be delusional, but I can’t stop thinking that I have to get into the Shapiro, even if just to get access to their records.”

“We, white man,” Michael said, again making reference to Ron Metzner’s Lone Ranger joke. “We’re a team, girl. There’s no way I’m going to let you go into Shapiro by yourself. If this is some major conspiracy, the risks go up.”

“It will be your decision if we get to that point,” Lynn said. “There’s still that thumbprint access that has to be overcome.”

They left Carl’s Cherokee in a visitor parking spot and walked across the hospital campus toward the medical dorm, a bit overwhelmed by what they had experienced and what they had been talking about. Neither one spoke, particularly as they passed the dark, nearly windowless Shapiro Institute. Both were now thinking about Carl being locked away in its bowels. It made it personal.

Such thinking was the hardest for Lynn, as it immediately evoked a combination of guilt, benumbing anger, and crushing loss, threatening her life on so many levels. She had to look away from the massive, sinister-looking building and force herself to think of
something else. “I guess I’m going to have to make an effort to look like I’m back to being a medical student.”

“Hallelujah, woman!” Michael exclaimed. “If we are dealing with a major conspiracy that’s uptight about us asking questions about Carl, then we gotta believe somebody is going to be keeping tabs on us.”

“Sounds so Orwellian,” Lynn said.

“I hope this means you’re planning on coming to the ophthalmology lecture in the morning?”

“I guess I have no choice.”

As they rode up in the elevator they leaned against opposite sides, regarding each other.

“Are you okay?” Michael asked.

“I’m a basket case,” Lynn admitted. “I’m wasted and I’m still shaky. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired and drained. I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.”

“Will you be able to sleep?”

“I hope so.”

“I might be able to find an errant sleeping pill if you’d like.”

“I’d like,” Lynn said. “And I do have yet another request.”

“Hit me!”

“Would you mind if I dragged my mattress down to your room? I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“Not a problem, as long as you don’t take advantage of me.”

“Under the circumstances, I don’t find that at all funny.”

“Sorry!”