visit the good doctor.
Even now that the Cold War was long over, and Schreiber’s days of covert
assistance to East Germany were pretty much finished, Trevor had little
doubt that the physician would cooperate. Schreiber could still be
prosecuted for his covert assistance to Stasi. That he would not want.
But his vulnerability did not keep Dr. Schreiber from bristling with
resentment. “You are a most fortunate man,” the doctor said brusquely.
“The bullet, you see, entered just over your heart. A slightly more
direct angle and you would have died immediately. Instead, it appears
to have entered at an oblique angle, digging a sort of trench in the
skin and the fatty tissue beneath. It even tore away some of the
surface fibers of the pectoralis major, your breast muscle. And exited
right here, at the axilla. You must have turned just in time.”
Dr. Schreiber glanced over his half-glasses at Trevor, who did not
reply.
He poked with a pair of forceps, and Trevor winced. The pain was
overwhelming. His body was suffused with an unpleasant prickly heat.
“It also came close to causing great damage to the nerves and blood
vessels in the area of the brachial plexus. Had it done so, you’d have
lost the use of your right arm permanently. Maybe even lost the arm
itself.”
“I’m left-handed,” Trevor said. “Anyway, I don’t need to know the gory
details.”
“Yes,” the doctor said absently. “Well, you really should go to the
hospital, the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, if we’re going to do this right.”
“That’s out of the question, and you know it.” A lightning bolt of pain
shot down his arm.
The doctor changed into his scrubs, and injected several syringes of a
local anesthetic around the wound. With a small pair of scissors and
forceps he excised some blackened tissue, irrigated the wound, and then
set about suturing it.
Trevor could feel a deep, tugging discomfort, but no real pain. He
gritted his teeth. “I want you to make sure the wound doesn’t open up
if I move around,” he said.
“You should take it easy for a little while.”
“I’m a fast healer.”
“That’s right,” the doctor said. “I remember now.” The man was a fast
healer–freakishly so.
“Time is the one luxury I don’t have,” Trevor said. “I want you to sew
it up tight.”
“Then I can use heavier suture materials–3-0 nylon, say–but it may
leave a rather ugly scar.”
“It doesn’t concern me.”
“Fine,” the doctor said, turning back to his steel cart of equipment.
When he had finished, he said, “For the pain, I can give you some
Demerol.” He added dryly, “Or would you prefer to go without anything?”
“Some ibuprofen should be enough,” Trevor said.
“As you wish.”
Trevor stood, wincing. “All right then, I appreciate your help.” He
handed the doctor a few thousand-shilling notes.
The physician looked at him and said, quite insincerely, “Any time.”
Anna splashed her face with hot water. Thirty times, her mother had
trained her: her mother’s only vanity. Keeps the skin vital and
glowing.
Over the running water she heard the phone ringing. Grabbing a towel to
dry her face, she ran to catch it.
“Anna, it’s Robert Polozzi. Am I calling you too late?”
Robert Polozzi from ID Section.
“No, not at all, Robert. What is it?”
“Listen: about the patent search.”
She’d forgotten about the patent search. She patted her dripping face.
He said: “The neurotoxin ”
“Oh, right. You found something?”
“So get this. May 16 of this year, patent number well, it’s a long
number anyway, a patent for this exact synthetic compound was applied
for by a small Philadelphia-based biotech company called Vortex. It’s
a, it says, ‘a synthetic analog of the venom of the conus sea snail for
proposed in-vitro applications.” And then some mumbo jumbo about
‘localizing ion channels’ and ‘tagging chemochyme receptors.”” He
paused, then resumed, his voice tentative. “I called the place. Vortex,
I mean. On a pretext, of course.”
A little unorthodox, but she didn’t mind. “Learn anything?”
“Well, not exactly. They say their stocks of this toxin are minimal and
under tight control. It’s hard to produce, so they don’t have much, and
anyway the stuff is used in ridiculously tiny quantities, and it’s still
experimental. I asked them whether it could be used as a poison, and
the guy I talked to, the scientific director of the firm, said of course
it could the conus sea snail’s venom, as found in nature, is highly
deadly. He said a tiny amount could induce immediate heart failure.”
She felt a growing excitement. “He told you the stuff is under tight
control that means it’s under lock and key?”
“Right.”
“And this guy strikes you as on the level?”
“I think so, but who knows.”
“Great work, thanks. Can you find out from them whether any of their
supply of this stuff has been found missing or otherwise unaccounted
for?”
“Already did,” the researcher said proudly. “The answer’s no.”
A pang of disappointment. “Can you find out for me everything you can
about Vortex? Owners, principals, employees, and so on?”
“Will do.”
She hung up, sat on the edge of the bed, pondered. It was possible that
tugging at this thread would unravel the conspiracy behind the murders.
Or unravel nothing.
The whole investigation was proving increasingly frustrating. Nor had
the Vienna police had any luck chasing down the shooter. The shooter’s
Peugeot had previously been reported stolen surprise, surprise. Another
dead end.
This Hartman she found baffling. Against her will she also found him
appealing, even attractive. But he was a type. A golden boy, born to
money, graced with good looks, overconfident. He was Brad, the football
player who’d raped her. The world cut men like that a break. Men like
that, a blunt-speaking girlfriend of hers in college used to say,
thought their shit didn’t stink. They thought they could get away with
anything.
But was he a killer? Somehow it seemed unlikely. She believed his
version of what had happened at Rossignol’s in Zurich; it jibed with the
fingerprint patterns and with her own sense of him. Yet he was carrying
a gun, passport control had no record of him arriving in Austria, and
he’d offered no explanation for that…. On the other hand, a thorough
search of his car hadn’t revealed anything. No syringe, no poisons,
nothing.
Whether he was a part of this conspiracy was hard to say. He’d thought
his brother had been killed four years ago; maybe that murder had been
the catalyst for those murders that came later. But why so many, and in
such a short span of time?
The fact remained: Benjamin Hartman knew more. Yet she didn’t have the
authority, or the grounds, to hold him. It was deeply frustrating. She
wondered whether her desire all right, obsession to get him had to do
with the rich-boy thing, the old wounds, Brad … She took her address
book from the end table, looked up a phone number, and dialed.
It rang several times before a gravelly male voice answered, “Donahue.”
Donahue was a money-laundering guru at DOJ, and she’d quietly enlisted
his help before she’d left for Switzerland. No context; just some
account information. Donahue didn’t mind being kept in the dark about
the nature of her investigation; he seemed to regard it as a challenge.
“It’s Anna Navarro,” she said.
“Oh yeah, right, how ya doin’ there, Anna?”
She found herself switching into her regular-guy voice. This she did
easily; it was how her father’s buddies talked, her neighbors back home.
“Doin’ good, thanks. How’re we doin’ on the money trace?”
“Na-a-ah, nothin’. We’re buttin’ our heads against a big brick wall.
It’s lookin’ like each of the dead guys got regular contributions booted
into their accounts from some haven country. Cayman Islands, British
Virgins, Curacao. That’s where we keep hittin’ the wall.”
“What happens when you go to these offshore banks with an official
request?”
A short bark of derision from Donahue. “They give us the finger. We
give ’em an MLAT request for their financial records, they say they’ll
get around to it some time next few years.” MLAT, she knew, was the
mutual assistance treaty, which in principle obtained between the United
States and many of these offshore havens. “BVI and Caymans are the
worst, they tell us maybe two, three years it’ll take ’em.”
“Huh.”
“But even if they should just open up the magic doors and show us
everything, all we’re going to get is where they got the money from, and
you can bet your paycheck it’s some other offshore. Isle of Man,
Bahamas, Bermuda, Lux, San Marino, Anguilla. Probably a whole chain of
off shores and shell companies. These days money can zip around the
world, movin’ between a dozen accounts in, like, seconds.”
“Mind if I ask you something?” she said.
“Go ‘head.”
“How do you guys ever get anything on money-laundering?”