The Devil's Elixir (38 page)

After a few seconds, an older man approached him. He must have been at least sixty. He was holding a bottle of water.

“You a soldier, son?”

The man sounded friendly. Like he wanted to help.

“I was,” Torres replied, shivering now. “Not now. Not anymore.”

The man took a few steps toward him, holding out the bottle as a peace offering.

“My brother was in the army,” he told Torres. “Got himself killed in Kuwait in ninety-one.” He held the water just a few inches from Torres’s hand. “Here. Drink this. You look like you need it. Just don’t hurt anyone else, son.”

Torres stared blankly at the bottle. After a long moment, he took it. He unscrewed the lid and raised the bottle to his lips, but as he was about to drink, he noticed a weird black shape inside the bottle near the bottom. He held the bottle up to the light and saw a snarl of black snakes writhing around in the water. They were grotesque, with bulbous eyes too big for their bodies and sharp spines along their backs. One of them thrashed against the side of the bottle and hissed at him.

They were trying to poison him. They’d do anything to get the creatures inside his body so they could rip him up from the inside.

He hurled the water across the room and pointed both guns at the old man, who nonetheless took a step toward him.

“Give me the guns, son,” the man said, calmly. “You need to give me the guns so you can get the help you need.”

He knew the man was lying, trying to trick him. He was going to take his guns, then drag him to some dark basement where they’d cut him up and feed on him. Is that what they did? He couldn’t make sense of it anymore. It was all jumbled up in his head. Was he back in the army, or was he dreaming? Monsters weren’t real. He knew that. But there was one standing right in front of him. And no way was he imagining this. It just was there, yellow eyes and fangs staring back at him, drool oozing over its bottom lip, talons outstretched.

He realized he had to get out before they ate him alive. There were too many creatures for him to defeat alone and he was locked in here with them. He had to leave. To run the gauntlet and escape. Shut in with the creatures, it was only a matter of time before they devoured him. Outside, at least he had a chance. And maybe they wouldn’t want to lose any more of their number. He’d soon find out.

He backed away from the treacherous monster and made for a small group of the creatures that were still pretending to be human. He grabbed a young woman around the neck and dragged her over toward the main entrance, pulling the keys from his pocket. He unlocked the doors and maneuvered the woman so she was in front of him, then opened one of the doors a few inches and peered out into the plaza.

“I’m coming out,” he shouted. “Let me go and I won’t kill this one.”

The mall was empty other than for two of the creatures waiting for him about sixty yards down the main plaza.

Torres took a step forward, but then he felt his hostage’s weight shift, as though it were trying to stop him from going any farther. He turned toward the creature. Giant razor-edged bones were breaking through the skin of its neck. Elongated talons were sprouting from the ends of its arms. Feathers were covering its body. Its face was melting as a serrated beak burst through the flesh. He let go of the disgusting creature, raised his gun and fired. Or he thought he did. He’d definitely meant to pull the trigger, but somehow he hadn’t managed to. Maybe it was something to do with the darkness flooding his head.

He felt his legs buckle underneath him.

The floor felt like quicksand under his boots, and as he fell, he wondered whether now, finally, he would be allowed to sleep.

 

I
held my breath as I watched Torres go down on the feed from the lead marksman’s helmet-mounted video camera. The bullet hit him square in the side of the head, just in front of his right ear. The woman he’d been using as cover only seconds before was hysterical, but alive.

Which was the prime objective.

I had no idea why Torres let go of her, but in doing so he had given the sniper a clear shot. A shot he’d had to take, since it was clear that Torres was about to kill his hostage.

I was fully aware of the probability that the siege would end with Torres dead. But knowing it didn’t make things any better. Navarro had yet again caused a bloodbath, and our only lead to him was dead.

I wondered why Navarro had opted to send an armed ex-Marine on a bad trip into a crowded mall. But then going from everything I’d learned over the past few days, it was clear that Navarro enjoyed the chaos and death that he caused. And that this almost certainly wasn’t going to be the last of it.

T
ess hadn’t slept well. She was all wired and angry, with a horde of powerful emotions warring inside her. It didn’t help that she also felt like a caged animal, straining against the confines of the safe house, unable to go out for a jog or a therapeutic cup of coffee.

She’d already called her mom and spoken to Hazel and to Kim, too, putting a gloss on what was really going on before asking them to keep an eye out while trying not to alarm them too much. She failed, of course, and she knew it. It wasn’t the first time she’d got herself into a sticky situation, even though this one wasn’t through any fault of her own. Still, she was glad the call was behind her. It needed to be done.

Jules was with Alex in the living room, keeping him busy. She’d hit gold by signing him up to Club Penguin on her laptop. Given his giggles and squeals, he was having a blast. Tess had left them alone after breakfast, feeling a need to some time on her own, and was out in the back garden of the house, sitting on the grass with her back against the trunk of a lone sycamore tree, deep in thought.

She was still reeling from what Reilly had told her the night before. At first, she’d been horrified by it, no matter what spin she put on it. Then she’d spent a lot of the night trying to put herself in his place, reliving it from his point of view, wondering what it was like and what she would have done in his place. And what she’d realized was that she couldn’t know. She knew it was easy to come to a rash judgment, as a passive outsider. It was very different from being there, on the ground, in the thick of it, with bullets flying and men intent on killing you swarming around you and the pressure of having to make a split-second decision weighing up your own moral instincts against a threat to the greater good. It wasn’t about excusing what he’d done. It was about trying to understand it, knowing that in his line of work, in the kinds of situations he willingly put himself into in the line of duty, impossible choices sometimes had to be made.

She was also locked on one other thought. She knew that, sooner or later, McKinnon would have been killed by Navarro. She knew this was a self-serving rationalization, but she still found some solace in it. Then she reminded herself of something else that had given her a small uplift. After they’d talked late into the night, she’d asked Reilly if there was anything else he hadn’t told her. If there would be any more bombshells to rock their world. He’d assured her there weren’t, and she believed him.

Her thoughts migrated to the reason all this was going on, and to Alex. She found herself wondering about the drawing, about what his teacher had told her, about what he’d said about the plant. She went back inside, picked up her iPad, grabbed the firewalled cell phone Jules had given her to replace her iPhone along with the piece of paper on which she’d scribbled the number Reilly had given her, and went back outside.

She called the number in Berkeley.

The phone went to voicemail, its standard message informing Tess that she’d reached the office of Dean Stephenson, that neither he nor his assistant, Marya, were available, and to leave a message.

She waited for the requisite beep, then introduced herself and said, “I’m calling for Professor Stephenson. It’s about Alex Martinez. It’s . . . I really need to talk to you. Alex’s mother has . . .” She hesitated, unsure about how much to say on a cold message. “She passed away, and I was hoping to talk to you to find out what we can do to help Alex through this difficult time.” She ended the message by asking him to call back, leaving her phone number, and thanking him.

The call made her uncomfortable, but she wasn’t sure why. She focused instead on moving on with the other question that was on her mind: what Alex had told his teacher, and her, about the plant he’d drawn.

She brought up Safari and Googled “Brooks,” the name Alex had mentioned, along with “plant” and “heart.” She got more than thirteen million hits, and after trawling through the first couple of hundred of them without coming across anything that struck her as relevant, she decided she needed to narrow her search and try again.

She tried it again, spelling the name with an “e” this time—Brookes.

Thirty-four million hits and change.

She frowned, went back to the original spelling, and typed in “Brooks,” “plant,” “flower,” “heart,” “medicine,” “treatment,” and “death,” then deleted a couple of names that had cropped up in her first search to avoid useless hits.

She was down to a slightly less daunting three hundred thousand hits, so she waded in.

An hour later, she came across something.

It was a news item on the WebMD website about a promising new heart treatment a pharmaceutical company had been trumpeting that had just had its testing suspended. The drug, which was based on an extract from a rare flower, had initially shown a lot of promise. Although the sap of the plant itself was poisonous, more than twenty useful alkaloids had been identified from it, and early testing had shown the drug they had synthesized from them to be a powerful cholesterol inhibitor. The company’s stock price had soared based on those early tests. Two years into the testing phase, however, everything had gone wrong. Several patients had developed cardiac complications that were traced back to the use of the drug, and the test phase was shut down.

Tess Googled the plant the article mentioned.

It was a small, unremarkable white flower. Then something else snared Tess’s attention. The plant’s natural habitat.

It was indigenous to the Amazonian rainforest.

Her skin tingled with unease, as if tiny, invisible ants were crawling all over her.

She wondered how Alex knew about this. Sure, he could have seen it on a news broadcast. But to understand what it did, at age four? And register the name of Brooks? And then, there was the way he said it. In the first person.
I told them about it
.
They didn’t like it
.

The ants were getting more agitated.

She chewed it over, her mind bouncing from one thought to another without managing to line them up into a coherent whole. After a while, she grew frustrated and decided to go inside and have another go at seeing if Alex would elucidate things for her, and her eyes caught sight of the note she’d written down when Reilly had called. She found herself pausing to stare at the name that was on it with a sense of intrigue that wasn’t there before.

Dean Stephenson.

Why did she know that name?

It was there, she was sure of it, tucked away in the attic of arcane tidbits her mind was prone to hoard, taunting her—but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

She decided to cheat and typed his name into the search box—and in the 0.15 seconds it took for the results to flash up, it came back to her.

There were more than four hundred thousands hits. She skipped the Wikipedia entry about the professor and went straight to the third result, his own webpage. It redirected to the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and specifically, to a specialty subsection called the Division of Perceptual Studies.

She felt her insides shrivel up with dread as the unthinkable started to fall into place, and within seconds, she was gone, losing all sense of place and time as she read page after page, immersing herself in Stephenson’s work and the endless stream of information rushing at her while tying it back to what had been happening the last few days.

And then an impossible thought struck her.

Impossible, and yet . . . she couldn’t ignore it.

She went back to the news item about the heart treatment, noted the name of the plant it had been derived from, and ran a new search around the suspended cure. This time, she added the name Wade McKinnon to the mix.

Her finger was trembling as she tapped the screen to initiate the search.

The result drove a spear through her senses that pinned her in place, and she understood.