Complex 90 Read online

  After he drove us through, the downpour discouraged the doctor from getting out and locking it behind us. This seemed to raise the ire of Colonel Toy but I couldn’t be sure, because Toy spoke in Russian, his voice imperious if nasal.

  Giles responded in English—“We’ll be fine, Colonel!”—but had obviously understood the man.

  Then the car slid under a canopy of overgrown trees and brush right out of my delirium, going down a private drive as rutted as the road that had brought us here. Rain pelted the roof of trees, making the leaves shudder, but when moisture did make it through, it arrived in noisy plops.

  Colonel Toy glanced at me, my head still hanging but my slitted eyes taking everything in, and said something else in acid-sounding Russian, a comment again directed at the front seat. This prompted Dr. Giles to glare back at me and say, “Don’t bother faking, Mr. Hammer. We know you’re awake.”

  I lifted my head a little, allowed my eyes to open fully. Toy gave me a sneer of a smile—these top Commie bastards were so often every bit as snooty as the blue bloods they despised.

  “No witty remarks, Mr. Hammer?” Lisa Contreaux asked, smiling back over her shoulder like a smug pixie. “Where’s that oh-so-tough patter you’re noted for?”

  I didn’t have any for her. Even if I had, I wasn’t sure any words could make it past the thick, cottony insides of my mouth.

  “Maybe it’s the drug,” she said, charitably. “Pretty soon it’ll wear off and you’ll be your sweet old charming self.”

  What a nasty little piece of business she was.

  Yet even with her hair turned by the rain into a nest of wet snakes, she made one lovely damn Medusa.

  Finally, the car nosed its way into an overgrown brick courtyard where I could barely make out the looming shapes of buildings in the storm. Then the thunder told the sky to turn on all its electricity, just to give me a better look, and now, for an endless second, I could see the buildings in stark detail.

  And I knew right where I was.

  This was Sister Island, in the midst of Hell Gate, a particularly hazardous stretch of the East River. Not technically an island, it was connected by a five-mile isthmus near 132nd Street in the Bronx. Its name derived from the Sisters of Mercy who had operated a tuberculosis hospital here in mid-1800s. For a long while the city ran it as a quarantine island, for treatment of smallpox and other deadly infectious diseases—Typhoid Mary herself was sequestered here. Most of the buildings dated to the late nineteenth century, but one modern hospital—Riverview Sanitarium—was constructed during the war as a facility for mentally ill and drug-addicted teenagers. Experimental drugs and shock treatment had been everyday fare around this joint.

  Riverview was controversial and notorious for questionable practices and had been shut down ten years ago. I knew, because I had broken a teenage kid out of this asylum for his mother when her husband had committed the kid, trying to get at some inherited money. The top doc had been bribed by hubby, I discovered. The scandal drove the place under, and I hadn’t even had to kill anybody to pull it off.

  So returning here, a decade later, had its ironic side, beyond just the notion that a lot of people had said I would wind up in an asylum some day. Or on some rain-swept, thunder-and-lightning-wracked night.

  Even before the more modern sanitarium had been shut down, most of the older buildings had fallen into disuse and disrepair. The doc guided the car down the overgrown access road that cut between buildings I knew well—a square-ish, gothic-looking pile of bricks that had been a morgue back in quarantine days, and an equally rundown former power plant for the island with its towering smokestack still intact. We rumbled by once magnificent turn-of-the-century structures, now sagging with age and neglect—a maintenance building, which had lost its roof, and the doctors’ cottage and a nurses’ residence quarters.

  The latter gave me a brief warm flash thinking of the cute nurse I’d got next to, when I was plotting that rich kid’s escape. I wondered what had become of her.

  I wondered what would become of me...

  The massive modern building was surprisingly low-slung, only four stories, but its width seemed endless, as if it were a beached steamship, the rounded edges at its widely separated ends like the bow and the stern. At the building’s mid-point rose a squat central tower, only one extra story taller, cement steps rising to the main entrance. The tower’s gothic look seemed out of place for such an otherwise modernistic structure, X’s carved into its face in an Aztec-style design. Maybe that was fitting. Plenty of patients had been sacrificed here to the gods of science.

  The rain had dissipated by the time we pulled into the kudzu-choked main parking lot of Riverview Sanitarium. Under a black, grumbling sky, I was hauled by the Dragon from the back of the sedan, which turned out to be a Lincoln—the doc another of these communists who liked nice things. This would have been a good time for me to spring into action and turn the tables on my captors, only my legs were rubbery and my fingers were numb, perhaps from the tightness of the adhesive tape binding my wrists together.

  Adhesive tape did make sense as impromptu handcuffs—they had not been expecting me to show up at the doc’s private practice. They’d had to make do. Giles had said he had run late because of walk-in patients—likely among them, Comrade Gorlin, who had after all been put through the mill in the brawl and shoot-out in my apartment.

  Gorlin practically dragged me up the many cement steps to the entrance into the central tower. The trouble I gave him wasn’t that of a rebel but of a sack of sand—I was still woozy and half-dazed from whatever Lisa Contreaux had dosed me with. She sure hadn’t had a gentle touch. My neck ached and burned as if a boil were coming to a head.

  The big doors weren’t locked, and Giles held one open like a genial doorman as the Dragon dragged me inside and across a lobby empty of furnishings but long on peeling green paint. The scratching of fleeing rats, hearing human entry, was the only indication of activity within these walls. Where the elevators had been, doors were gone, cars absent, revealing empty space where wires and cables dangled.

  In ten years, the place had got seriously run down, but it still looked vaguely habitable, like a slum building that just needed a less venal landlord. The doctor and Lisa, their raincoats still leaving a damp trail, went on ahead of us up a stairwell. Gorlin dragged me five endless flights, Colonel Toy bringing up the rear, and it wore the hell out of me.

  But it wasn’t all bad.

  Because I was starting to feel something in my hands, and my legs were under me now, working damn near the way legs should, and the little guy inside my head had traded in his bass drum for a kid’s toy snare, doing little irritating rolls that were still a hell of a lot better than boom boom boom. On the third landing, I was able to pause and catch my breath because Dr. Giles was stopping to catch his. The pain in my neck was worse now than the one behind my eyes.

  Progress.

  Every floor we glimpsed was dirty and flung with refuse and dotted with rat shit, often with fallen ceiling tiles that looked half-eaten. There was less peeling paint because the walls were yellow ceramic tile with just an upper edging of plaster. Still, the place was a mess. That this had been a hospital once made the filth seem somehow filthier.

  When we got to the fifth floor of the truncated tower, some sweeping up had been done, clearing a path. Otherwise we were met by more mess. Then we followed Dr. Giles as he pushed through double doors into another world.

  A light switch was thrown and florescent overheads revealed a good-size science laboratory. Spotless. Pristine. Goddamn gleaming. While no repainting had been done on the edging of plaster wall above the ceramic tile, it had been scraped and any residue swept away. This could have been a top lab in any hospital or research facility. The counters and benches had the expected beakers and burners and test tubes and meters and microscopes, but also sophisticated equipment I could never hope to identify.

  Obviously, much of Giles’ research had been conducted here, not
at Manheim University. Some work had been done at the school, perhaps even the Complex 90 breakthrough itself achieved, but the final stages had been performed here, in secret, with Soviet funding.

  I just slumped there with Gorlin propping me up—and now I was faking, because I could have stood on my own two feet, but why not let the son of a bitch wear himself out? We had paused because Dr. Giles and Lisa Contreaux were hanging up their wet raincoats in a closet. Giles still wore his white smock and Lisa was in another of her silk blouse and pencil skirt combos, this one pink and red. Showing her true colors at last.

  She was reaching for a white smock from an adjacent closet when she asked, “Shall I prepare the dosage, Harmon?”

  Harmon, she called him—not “doctor” or “Dr. Giles,” or even “Giles.” Harmon. The familiarity was telling.

  “Yes, please do—thank you, dear.”

  Well, that was telling, too.

  “I can manage Mr. Hammer quite easily,” Giles told her. “That drug won’t wear off entirely for several hours. He’s going to be as easy to handle as a lamb.”

  They didn’t know much about me, or my constitution, did they? The doc should have stuck to curing the outer space flu.

  Colonel Toy was standing off to one side looking quietly pissed off. He said, “You should have locked that gate.”

  English now

  “We’ll be fine,” the doctor said, amiable but with just the tiniest edge of irritation.

  Toy reached inside his black raincoat and withdrew a Makarov pistol. The doc flinched, and Lisa frowned, but if they thought they were about to be threatened, they had read their comrade wrong.

  “I will go down and guard the gate,” the cadaverous figure in the abbreviated Cossack cap said rather grandly. “We do things right.”

  Meaning the K.G.B., of course.

  In a curt manner that suggested he was giving orders, Toy spoke to the Dragon in Russian, then said to the doctor, “Comrade Gorlin will be on guard below. In the lobby.”

  Giles said, “Before he goes, the comrade needs to lend me a hand here. Just to get Mr. Hammer situated.”

  Toy seemed annoyed, but nodded curtly.

  Then Gorlin hauled me through a push door into an adjoining room, a smaller one that opened off the lab. The doc reached in and flipped a switch on more fluorescence.

  This area had been given a cursory cleaning but was not in the sanitary condition of its neighbor, and seemed strictly for storage. Counters rimmed the room, stacked with cardboard boxes of medical and scientific supplies. It may have once been an examining room or perhaps a modest operating room. The big object in its midst seemed to confirm the latter.

  An antique operating table, a baroque-looking affair with a metal base painted white but chipped away here and there, stood dead center. A big metal wheel allowed for adjustments to the three-piece table, whose trio of steel surfaces had been cleaned and perhaps even polished, though they stopped short of gleaming, more a flat, dull glow. Odd, serrated loops of steel near where a patient’s arms and feet would rest appeared to be ports for restraints.

  Giles read my confusion and he beamed at me, as benign as a country doctor circa 1920—the major difference was the eyes behind those wire-framed glasses. They were a little crazy.

  “No, Mr. Hammer, I’m not performing experimental operations using equipment out of the dark ages. When we scouted this property for our possible use—and we are renting it quite legally, you will I’m sure be relieved to know—I spotted this little beauty. A very valuable antique, dating back to quarantine days. I had it moved in here for now. Eventually I’ll have it moved out, and into my personal collection. Uh, Comrade Gorlin?”

  Giles gestured toward the operating table, indicating the doctor’s wish that I be deposited on that three-tiered steel bed. The Dragon picked me up like I was his unlucky bride and, in lieu of a threshold to cross, slammed me down there. On my back, my bound hands still behind me.

  It hurt like hell, getting rudely dumped like that. But I was glad to be feeling pain somewhere besides my neck or inside my head, glad especially to have the numbness leave my fingers so that I could move and wiggle them again. Yes my wrists were bound together, but now at least I had some motion in my hands. Just in case I wanted to play patty-cake with myself...

  ...or maybe wanted to work on getting that safety razor blade from the slit in my belt, and use it to cut into and through these adhesive-tape bonds. So much easier than dealing with rope. Still, I had to turn and twist my wrists without giving away what I was up to. I did this as carefully, as subtly as I could...

  In her white smock, Lisa pushed in through the door, and she had another hypo in her hand. Definitely a one-note kind of nurse.

  “Shall I administer it, Doctor?”

  Not “Harmon,” now—but then things were getting serious, right? They were about to perform an operation.

  “I handle that, thanks,” Giles said, taking the hypo from her. “Get his pants off him, would you?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  She came over and smiled at me as she started to undo my belt.

  Damn! I almost had that blade out! If she yanked my damn trousers off, taking my belt alongfor the ride, I could say goodbye to any hope of escape...

  I grinned gamely at her. “And to think I was looking forward to this moment.”

  Her smile seemed genuinely amused if a little confused. “Were you, really? This moment?”

  “Sure,” I said. “The moment when you peeled my pants off of me, and we got down to business.”

  “Ah,” she said, and shook her head. Some moisture from the still damp mass of gypsy curls flicked at me. “I thought we might hear from that rough wit of yours.”

  “Anything to please you, baby.”

  “Bravado, Mike? In the face of death? I don’t know whether to admire you or pity you.”

  “Can’t it be both?”

  I had almost had the thing!

  Her fingers were undoing my belt buckle. “You have such an astonishingly high opinion of yourself, Mike. You really thought I desired you? That all my talk of scientific and intellectual pursuits was just so much blather? That what I needed, what I wanted, was a man with wide shoulders, a two-fisted he-man who packed a big... gun...?”

  She unzipped my pants.

  “You were right, of course, about Dennis Dorfman,” she admitted. “Poor Dennis, very smart boy, if not quite brilliant. But he was close to the head of the space research project at Manheim, and it was handy being able to manipulate him for what I needed... for what Harmon needed... and such child’s play to keep track of what Dennis knew about what we were up to. So that if he ever discovered or even just guessed what strides Harmon was actually making, we could do something about it.”

  “So this kid you were sleeping with became just another casualty for the greater good, huh? Like Ralph Marley. Or a young Russian girl named Zora. And an American G.I. called Des Casey.”

  “Like Marley, yes. The other two are names I’m afraid I’ve never heard before. Do you know the names of the forty-five people you killed, Mike?”

  “You knew Dennis’s name.”

  “I did.”

  “Did you run him down yourself, Lisa?”

  “Does that matter? No, I didn’t. I hired it done. That’s the thing about so many Americans, Mike. They’ll do anything for money.”

  She yanked my pants down around my ankles, the steel of the table cold against my bare legs.

  But the steel of that little razor blade felt warm between my fingers.

  The scar and redness in my thigh where that bullet had caught me seemed to stand out under the bright light.

  “No, Mike, I am not in the least attracted to big, strong, brutal idiots like you. To me, a real man is Dr. Harmon Giles. A man who cares about science. And about world peace.”

  “And I’m sure an old bird like the doc,” I said, as my fingers worked the blade into the adhesive tape, “is drawn to you strictly for that
brain of yours. Just a bonus that it’s stuck inside a stacked young body.”

  Her dark eyes jumped with anger. “You are a stupid son of a bitch, Mike Hammer.”

  “Like I haven’t heard that before.”

  The doctor had been working at the counter. Now he turned toward me, with the hypo in one hand and with the other raised in a palm-out, calming fashion. “Step back outside, Nurse. I won’t be needing any further assistance.”

  This time he called her “nurse.” Just to make her feel official and not merely his young honey. The doc had brains, all right. Lisa was right about that much.

  She slipped out.

  He was hovering over me with the hypo.

  “What’s that, Doc? A sedative?”

  An amused smile curved under his mustache. “Of a sort. You see, Mr. Hammer, transporting you back to Russia is out of the question now. You have been successful in disrupting our plans, and you may take satisfaction in that.”

  “You bet your ass.”

  “But it is still necessary to retrieve that capsule with the Complex 90 formula. It was never intended to be inside of you for quite so long, which is why you’ve suffered some discomfort.”

  “And now you’ll relieve my discomfort, Doc?”

  “In a way. We wouldn’t want that capsule turning up in an autopsy, as you yourself noted, should your body wash up to shore. No, not a sedative, Mr. Hammer. You see, in the case of this surgery, it’s not required for you to be alive at the outset.”

  He leaned in and my right arm came out from under me and my hand moved around to clutch his wrist and my other hand came around to grab onto his smock and hold him there as, in one swift motion, I jammed the needle into his neck and my thumb pressed down on his, sending whatever poison he’d intended for me into his jugular.

  He back-pedaled from his antique operating table, arms windmilling, hypo still stuck in his neck, and he knocked into the counter and slid to the floor and sat there in astonishment.