Heart Stopper (23 page)

Priya said, “You were very close with Daniel. And you were able to get close enough to him to use that, that thing.” Her eyes widened as the thought came to her. “You’re the researcher Daniel had a thing with, not Valerie.”

Gerry looked puzzled.

“Me? No. We were friends. Close friends. What do you mean? Valerie?”

Gerry looked at Valerie’s prone figure.

“He was a bit agitated to see me that evening. There had been a woman there with him; it was obvious he had been in bed when I arrived.” Gerry seemed to be thinking aloud. He shook his head.

“We don’t have time for this. They are expecting the device to be ready and working by tomorrow at the latest. It has to be delivered before the 28
^th
.”

“Gerry!” Priya felt her voice rise.

The man, who had let them talk, now spoke. “We have had to lose some people to ensure the utmost secrecy. Personally, I don’t work this way, but we’ve had to clean up the mess your friend here created when he left his area of expertise. All our work, all our planning, it comes down to this. Whether you can get the long-range device working in the next few hours. Right now, that is what you need to focus on. If I could use the other device I would, but we cannot get closer to the target without suspicion. And that is one thing we cannot afford. Even a hint of suspicion would defeat the purpose, make all our efforts meaningless.”

Priya glared at the man. “You killed Michael. Why?”

He grimaced. “It almost worked. Would have been too obvious to kill you then. There can be absolutely no comeback from this. Gerry here suggested a tactic he had successfully used before to throw you off track. You just turned up early. I had an interesting diversion planned so that the cops would have been right outside the door when you found your friend. A little strategic feeding of information into the right ears and you’d have been banged up as a raving lunatic and murderer. We’ve been searching for your PhD papers. But we have
you
now.”

Priya thought she might be sick if she looked at Gerry. “What tactic did he use before?”

Gerry said, “I know you spent the last while blaming yourself for Kathy’s death. And I know it was a high price for you to pay for being in the right place at the wrong time.”

She looked at him in confusion.

He said, “I couldn’t risk you figuring out what you had found. And then when that woman had an affair with Valerie and wouldn’t stop calling, it just came to me. I needed a test case for the first device, I needed you to leave that particular field of study, and I needed to punish that woman.”

Priya could hear him speaking, but the words still made no sense.

“That woman? Kathy?”

He nodded.

“But she killed herself. From what they said, there was a lot of blood, she used razors.”

“How many times had she called you before that? What, once every few weeks. I heard her on the phone to Valerie the last few times. Poor Valerie, she didn’t want anything to do with that woman. I think it had just been a curiosity thing on Valerie’s part you know. I don’t think anything really happened, but that woman wouldn’t let it go. When she called the second time that night I knew you hadn’t gone to her. I went in. I’m afraid I had to do the cutting before I used the device. This was one situation I needed it not to look like a heart attack.”

 
Priya turned and retched. She hadn’t eaten and nothing came out except a spurt of acid and saliva. She leaned against the counter and held a hand to her mouth. She realized her face was wet with tears. She wondered if she was going to faint and she could hear Reyna’s voice calling her through a fog.

Gerry was still talking.

“You went off the rails. Even better result than I could have hoped for.” He shook his head. “It was a real pity though, you know, you were the brightest of the lot. God! Priya, think about what we could have done if we could have worked together.”

The man said, “Like you’re going to do now. If you both are all that bright, it shouldn’t take long.”

Gerry smiled. “I always liked a challenge.”

Gerry patted her hand and her skin crawled. The sun had chased the shadows off the counter and his skin glowed pale against hers.

Priya realized that if he had been crawling at the edge of madness for the last few years, he had just jumped off the cliff.

The man said, “I hate to interrupt, but I’m not seeing any progress.”

His voice was irritated, the first break in the calm. She needed him to remain calm. She had to forget everything else and focus on getting them out of there alive. She rubbed her face, trying to scrub the thoughts away.

She said, “Considering how I left the study, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to add anything. I’ve spent the last few years trying to forget I had a brain.”

Gerry turned to Priya and his voice took on a professorial tone as he pointed out the main elements in front of him. She brought her thoughts into focus as he explained his genius. He took pains to point out where her work had provided him with the answers, or the path to further answers. It seemed like a release for him, after years of not being able to talk about it with anyone, he was suddenly free. Her nausea deepened as she realized he was like a child offering up treasure to his mother, that he seemed to consider Priya as his source, was waiting to drink in her praise.

She closed her eyes. She needed that intellect she had tried so hard to submerge. And she knew in her heart that though her mind had been used to develop a weapon before, she would not let it happen consciously. So as the figures and methods, the frequencies and code, danced in front of her eyes, as she fought to return to a time when that was all she needed to solve her problems, a section of her brain was working on a plan. And her heart was saying goodbye.

She stole a glance around her. She measured the distance from the spot in front of her to the man. To Reyna. To Valerie. She and Gerry were the only two in the room within three feet of where the long-range device would be. She was not going to save Gerry, but she needed the man to be closer.

She turned to the man. He had been staring out of the window and she saw him watching the Corrib Princess float by, its upper deck empty. She could hear the commentary in her mind, clearer than when she had sat in its lower deck on the couch seating, proud of her river, proud of her city, showing it off to her parents.

Priya asked him, “If this is going to be used to kill someone, how are you going to protect the person who presses the button? They are going to be within three feet.”

He turned his head to look at her.

“He has had a pacemaker installed.”

She said, “So when his natural pacemaker is destroyed, the artificial one will kick in and keep his rhythm going. Smart of you. And a huge sacrifice for him.”

The man nodded. He said, and for the first time his voice held a trace of emotion, “People have made sacrifices for this. It is necessary.”

She tried again, this time desperate with hope that Reyna would pick up the message. “You know, if this device goes off there is still a 3 minute timeframe where your target’s heart will stop, but the brain will remain alive. It is not a sure thing. If someone were to carry out immediate CPR and keep doing it until help arrived there is a possibility the target could be saved.” She kept her eyes fixed on the traces of acne scars on the man’s face. She noticed in her peripheral vision that Reyna was staring at her.

 
“We would be able to distract the help away for a few minutes…” He turned his head and looked back at the window.

Priya focused on what Gerry was doing in his development of the long-range device. The minutes dragged. He was close, but he had started just right of center. His calculations were off by a fraction. He had designed the new device to look like a home controller, above suspicion. He had coded it to create the frequency pattern that should have destroyed the particular ion channels in the test set-up. The ones set up to match the ion channels in the heart muscle that controlled the self-generation of the electrical activity. The oscillometer was measuring the frequency that was being emitted. The frequency was being fed into the ion channel study chambers.

She studied the code. And saw it.

He had made a mistake. And the more he looked through it the less chance he had of seeing it. Wasn’t that how one of the space shuttles crashed, she thought, a missing comma? This wasn’t as simple as punctuation, but in the picture in her mind, the error stood out now like a neon sign blinking on an empty motorway.

Priya said, “You’re not going to let us go anyway, are you? Once we fix this, assuming we can, what’s to stop you killing us then?”

The man turned around. The buttons on his black jacket caught the sunlight and bounced it into her eyes. She knew he couldn’t kill them yet. If she fixed the device, he would kill them and leave and someone would die. And there would be a weapon out there that could be used to commit an undetectable murder. What would he do if she refused to fix it?

“Interesting situation we have here. Let me make it more interesting for you. While I don’t have a working device, she’s expendable.” He gestured with the gun at Reyna. “And the other one there. If she’s still alive.” He nodded in Valerie’s direction. “You two ‘scientists’ are not expendable.”

He moved a step closer and pointed at the device. “However, when I have a working device, you will become expendable, I’ll probably let him live and I don’t really care what happens to her.” He pointed to Valerie with his empty hand. Then turned and looked at Reyna. “Ms. Fairer will not be expendable any more. I made a deal, a working device and the daughter and granddaughter live.” He smiled. “I see you’ve already worked it out.”

Priya saw that Reyna had been quiet because of the threat to her mother. She didn’t know what the exact words would have been, but they had been effective.

Reyna’s life. That was what it came down to for Priya in this little equation of life. The immediate equation. The extended equation involved other people. She could only see one way to solve both equations.

She nodded at the man and he smiled again. “Waste of a good mind. Maybe we should keep you instead of him. But somehow, I don’t think you’d do it for all the money in the world. And I certainly wouldn’t want to have to spend the rest of my time holding a gun to her head. Although, if you could convince me that we could work together, you could be well rewarded. And I wouldn’t need that.” He nodded in Gerry’s direction and Priya could see the disgust in the man’s eyes.

He turned back to the window. He was now within four feet of the device.

 
Priya caught Reyna’s eye. She stared at Reyna, and then looked at the emergency defibrillator on the wall. She stared back at Reyna and willed her to understand. She saw Reyna’s eyes follow hers and she looked back to see that Reyna’s eyes had lingered on the red casing. Reyna looked back at Priya and Priya stared at the device on the counter in front of Gerry and back at the defibrillator. She didn’t know if the defibrillator would work or if CPR was the answer, but she had planted both ideas. She saw the growing awareness and then the horror in Reyna’s eyes. Priya took in a deep breath. The message had been received, Priya didn’t know if it would be enough. And after she pressed the button, she might never know.

She reached for the new device and took it out of Gerry’s hands. She smiled through the glaze over her eyes. She’d used her intellect to win her father’s love, had allowed it to be used by Valerie to seduce her, and had spent the time since trying to destroy it. And now, when she’d found someone she could love, who she thought loved her for all the right reasons... She stopped her thoughts from going there.

Her fingers flew over the keypad as she programmed the new weapon. She didn’t need to test it. She knew it would work. She looked around again and measured the distance. The man was about 4 feet away. Priya just had to make sure where he ended up was within 3 feet of her and that Reyna was further than 3 feet away. She picked out the spot on the floor. She disconnected the keyboard. Picked up the device. Felt its cold corners as her hands curved around it.

Gerry looked at her and then at the device in her hand.

Priya whispered, “All that money, Gerry, where did it go? I didn’t really think that was a great motivator for you.”

Gerry glanced at Valerie’s inert form on the floor.

Priya continued, “You loved her
that
much?”

She was surprised that Gerry kept his voice to a whisper too. “I love her. She, she…”

“Consumed you?”

He nodded. There was a look of fervor in his eyes. “She didn’t know about my work with them. She didn’t know where the money came from. She needed all that stuff to be happy, the houses, the car. I didn’t, I came from a comfortable background. She came from a poor family you see. We had it all, and then the crash came. She is so beautiful. She doesn’t realize how beautiful she is, she thinks she’s losing everything as she gets older. She is so innocent.”

Priya almost lost control of the train she was driving towards him.

She whispered, almost directly into his ear, “For the last two years, I felt so guilty because of what Valerie and I did behind your back, but you are a monster.” She moved her head back and saw first the confusion and then the rage in Gerry’s eyes as he processed what she had said.