He didn’t know whether to wish she was inside–or to pray she wasn’t.
Ben turned around and headed back down the mountainside.
“Well, I see you’re more aware now,” Lenz said, smiling brightly. He
stopped at the foot of her bed and clasped his hands in front of him.
“Perhaps now you’d like to say to whom you’ve told my real identity.”
“Screw you,” she said.
“I thought not,” he said equably. “Once the ketamine has worn off”-he
glanced at his gold watch–“which will be in no more than another half
an hour, certainly, you’ll be infused intravenously with about five
milligrams of a powerful opioid called Versed. You have had this
before? During surgery, perhaps?”
Anna gazed at him blankly.
He continued, unruffled. “Five milligrams is about the proper dose to
make you relaxed but still responsive. You’ll feel a little rush, but
this passes in ten seconds or so, and then you’ll feel calmer than
you’ve ever felt before in your life. All your anxiety will seep out of
you. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
He cocked his head to one side like a bird. “If we were to inject you
with one single bolus of this drug, you’d stop breathing and very
probably die. So we must titrate it slowly over eight to ten minutes.
We certainly don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Anna gave a grunt that communicated, she hoped, both skepticism and
sarcasm at once. Despite her chemically induced calm, she was at the
same time deeply frightened.
“Rather, you’ll be found dead in your wrecked rental car, another victim
of drunk driving–”
“I didn’t rent a car,” she slurred.
“Oh, in fact you did. Or rather, it was done for you, using your credit
card. You were arrested last night in a neighboring town. Your blood
alcohol level was measured at two-point-five, which is surely why you
got into an accident. You were kept overnight in a holding cell and
then released. But you know how it is with problem drinkers–they never
learn.”
She displayed no reaction. But her mind raced, desperate to find a way
out of the maze. There had to be flaws in his plan, but where?
Lenz continued, “Versed, you see, is the most effective truth serum ever
invented, even though it was not intended for this use. All the drugs
the CIA has tried, like sodium pentothol or scopolamine, they never
worked. But with the correct dose of Versed you’ll become so free of
inhibitions that you’ll tell me anything I want to know. And here’s the
magical thing: afterward you’ll remember nothing. You’ll talk and talk
quite lucidly and yet, from the moment you’re put on the IV, you’ll have
no memory of what happened. It’s really quite remarkable.”
A nurse entered the room, wide-hipped and squat and middle-aged. She
rolled in a cart of equipment tubes, blood-pressure cuffs, syringes and
began setting up. She watched Anna suspiciously as she filled a few of
the syringes from little vials and then applied preprinted labels to
them.
“This is Gerta, your nurse-anesthetist. She is one of our best. You
are in good hands.” Lenz gave Anna a little wave as he left the room.
“How are you feeling?” Gerta asked perfunctorily, in a stern contralto,
as she hung a bag of clear liquid on the IV stand to the left of Anna’s
bed.
“Pretty … groggy …” Anna said, her voice trailing off, her eyes
fluttering closed. But she was hyper-vigilant; now she had a tentative
plan.
Gerta did something with what sounded like plastic tubing. After a few
moments she said, “All right, I’ll come back. Doctor wants to wait
until the ketamine is mostly out of your system. If we start the Versed
now you may stop breathing. Anyway, I have to go to the anesthesia
workroom. This sat probe is no good.” She closed the door behind her.
Anna opened her eyes and flung her body hard to the left, as hard as she
could, augmenting the push by throwing her manacled arms into it. It was
a movement she was beginning to master. The bed seemed to jump several
inches toward the supply cart. There was no time to rest. One more
try, and she was there.
She lifted her shoulders as far as the restraining belt would allow and
pressed her face against the cold top edge of the cart. Out of the
corner of her left eye she could see the safety pins, used to secure
bandages, in their little square blister-wrap sterile packaging, just an
inch or two away.
Yet still out of reach.
If she turned her neck to the left as far as it would go, she could
almost look at the pack of safety pins straight on. The tendons on her
neck and along her upper back were so strained they began to tremble.
The ache quickly became excruciating.
Then, like a jeering child, she stuck her tongue all the way out. Tiny
pinpoints of pain jabbed the underside of her tongue at its root.
Finally she lowered her distended tongue to the surface of the cart as
if it were a steam shovel. It touched the plastic of the package, and
she slowly pulled her head backward, edging the pack along as she did,
right to the edge of the cart. Just before it could teeter off the edge
she clenched it between her teeth.
A footfall, and the door to her room came open.
Quick as a rattlesnake she lay back on the bed, the little blister-pack
concealed under her tongue, its sharp edges poking at its base. How
much had she seen? The nurse was coming toward her. Anna gagged but
kept the packet in her closed mouth in a pool of saliva.
“Yes,” Gerta said, “ketamine can make you nauseated sometimes, it will
do that. You’re awake, I see.”
Anna made a complaining mmmmph through her shut mouth and shut her eyes.
Saliva pooled behind her front teeth. She forced herself to swallow.
Gerta came around to Anna’s right and began fumbling at the head of the
bed. Anna shut her eyes and tried to make her breathing sound regular.
A few minutes later Gerta left the room again and closed the door
quietly behind her.
She would be back much sooner this time, Anna knew.
There was blood in her mouth from where the packet had cut into soft
tissue, and Anna moved it to her lips with her tongue and then spit it
out, forward. It landed squarely on the back of her left hand. She
moved her hands together and reached her right index finger over,
pulling the safety-pin packet into her fist.
Now she moved quickly. She knew what she was doing, because she had
picked these locks on more than one occasion when she had misplaced the
key and was too embarrassed to ask for a replacement.
The wrapping came off with some difficulty, but then it was an easy
thing to bend the safety pin’s point away from its clasp.
The left cuff first. She inserted the pinpoint into the lock, pushed
the inner pins to the left, then to the right, and the lock clicked
open.
Her left hand was free!
She felt exhilarated. Even more quickly now she freed her right hand,
then the restraining belt, and then the door came open again with a low
squeak. Gerta had returned.
Anna drew her hands back into the polyurethane cuffs so that they
appeared still to be fastened and closed her eyes.
Gerta approached the bed. “I could hear you moving in here.”
Heart pounding so loud it had to be audible.
Anna opened her eyes slowly and made them look unfocused.
“I say enough is enough,” Gerta said menacingly. “I think you are
making pretend.” Under her breath she added, “So we will have to take
our chances.”
God, no.
She applied a rubber tourniquet to Anna’s left arm until the vein popped
out, and inserted the intravenous needle, then turned her back to adjust
the flow clamp on the IV tubing. In one snapping-turtle motion Anna
pulled her hands free of the unlocked cuffs and tried silently to undo
the tourniquet, quiet, must be quiet, but Gerta heard the snap of the
rubber and turned around, and as she did Anna raised herself up off the
bed as far as the chest belt would allow and caught the nurse’s neck
with the crook of her right elbow, a strange gesture of affection.
Pulled back hard on the rubber tube, hard against Gerta’s fleshy neck.
A yelp.
Gerta flailed her hands, reached for her neck, tried to claw her fingers
under the garrote, could not get a purchase, her fingernails scratching
at her own neck, wriggling madly. Her face purpled. Her mouth gasped
and sucked for breath. Gerta’s fluttering hands slowed; she was
probably losing consciousness.
Within a few minutes Anna, almost numb from exertion, had the nurse