The Firefly

Prologue

The man who calls himself Jäger Heismann awakes in the dimly lighted recovery room of the private cosmetic surgery clinic in northwest Washington, D.C. He blinks rapidly to clear his sticky eyelids and then checks his watch. Almost midnight. Fire time. He closes his eyes for a few more minutes. His brain is not quite clear yet. He hears a nurse attendant come into the room, smooth his covers, check a monitoring panel, and leave. He does a mental situational-awareness check: He's just been through the last of the eighteen procedures of his year-and-a-half ordeal, this one relatively minor. His lower face and lips are numb and feel swollen to his touch. His lungs feel heavy and there is a soporific wave lapping at the edges of his brain, but otherwise he's in no pain. He concentrates on deep breathing to disgorge the last remnants of the anesthetic. The monitor behind him beeps encouragingly.

Sometime later, he opens his eyes and checks his watch again: midnight. His head is just about clear.

He sits up and swings his legs gingerly out of the bed, then waits for his balance to stabilize. He thinks about what he's about to do and summons the adrenaline necessary for the task. There's still a slight heaviness in the bottoms of his lungs, so he does some more deep breathing, shoulders back, focusing on extending his diaphragm. The monitor's beeping noise accelerates as he comes alive, so he reaches up and hits its power button and then removes all the probes and wire patches from his skin. There's no IV. He gets up, pulls on his street clothes, still doing the deep breathing and using a towel in his mouth to suppress the sounds of a sudden coughing fit. He goes over to the closet where he stashed his small duffel bag earlier, takes out the liquid Taser gun and its fluid pack, and carefully straps it on. He retrieves his jacket and slips it on loosely over the Taser gear.

He cracks opens the door to the hallway and listens while he arms the Taser unit. He can hear the nurses cleaning up in the surgery, one door away, and the low murmur of the two doctors talking in their office, a door away in the opposite direction. The men first, he decides.

One more really deep breath. He detects the slight taste of something chemical at the back of his throat. Then he adjusts the portable tank pack and steps out into the hallway, the stubby Taser gun in hand, its fluid tube trailing around to the small of his back. He walks quietly down the hall and pushes the door to the doctors' private office fully open. They're still in their scrubs, drinking tea. The fat older Paki is dictating notes into a small machine. They both look up, surprised, although hardly alarmed. They never see the Taser in his hand. He points its boxy snout at the fat one, barely sees the charged stream arc out, and then the swarthy man is going over backward in his chair, flopping onto the carpeted floor like a pregnant fish. Heismann then turns and nails the other one, the young one, only two years out of Karachi, whose mouth is opening to protest. His whole body jumps and then pitches forward into a fetal position on the floor, one heel twitching audibly. Heismann waits a second and them hits each of them again, this time aiming directly for their exposed throats, sending them deep into a stunned stupor.

The equivalent of 400,000 volts. Nonlethal, they call it. Looks lethal to him. They're not dead — yet. He hefts the portable tank, tightens one strap, and then goes down the hall to the surgery.

Two women in green scrubs are loading the autoclave with trays of instruments. One of them sees him and smiles. "You're up," she says brightly.

"Ya," he mumbles, and drops her with a jolt to the throat. The tray of instruments crashes to the floor. The other, eyes widening, realizes something's terribly wrong and puts out her hand defensively. Heismann fires the stream right at it and she makes a sound like a turkey as her arms snaps back into her face. She stumbles against the autoclave, then folds to the floor, arm twitching. They both end up on their faces, so he fires a second stream at each one, hitting them in the back of the neck, hearing them grunt in turn. Then he turns off the unit and pockets the Taser. Mentally smiling at the memory of the instructor's careful warning about that sequence: "Unit off, then pocket it. Never the other way round." He grabs some plastic gloves out of box and puts them on.

He drags the two semiconscious doctors down to the surgery and dumps them around the operating table. Then he drags the nurses over. The younger one has one unfocused eye partially open. She can see him. She groans, but she still can't move. He begins setting up for the fire, then pauses. If they'd all been working in here, one of them would have seen the fire and tried for the fire extinguisher. Right. He drags the middle-aged nurse by her heels over to the wall near the door, where there's a fire extinguisher. He puts it near her clenched hands. Then he pulls the pin and fires it in the direction of the operating table's curtain, covering the floor and lower wall in white powder, where the arson squad should find it. He can see her fingers twitching, but she still can't move her arms. Plenty of time, although he has the feeling he's missing something about the nurses.

Leaving the one nurse by the door, he repositions the remaining "victims" on the other side of the operating table. He glances again at his watch and then sets up the oxygen system for the fire. He's especially careful with the system lineup, ganging the two green service tanks together to ensure a plentiful supply. There are two spare nitrous-oxide tanks in a separate locker with a glass front panel. These are the ones he swapped out on Sunday, and they are fakes. What looks like metal valves and pressure gauges are instead heavy-gauge plastic, which shortly will melt.

Making sure the service valves are closed, he uses his cigarette lighter to burn through the oxygen-gas supply hose where it passes right over the wall receptacle. He takes an insulated screwdriver from his little bag and chooses the autoclave's three-pronged plug as the ignition source. He pulls one of the surgical curtains back to the wall, making sure it's in contact with the autoclave's cord. Then he pulls the plug partially out of the wall and touches the hot prong and the ground prong at the same time with the blade of the tool. There's a nasty snapping noise and a brief flash of arc light, but then the breaker trips down the hall, taking some of the surgery's lights with it. Dumb design, he thinks as he extracts the lighter again.

He checks to see that the blade prong has been physically cut by the arc, then ignites the hem of the surgical curtain. This, too, he had replaced on his 2:00 a.m. visit Sunday, substituting plain nylon for the fire-resistant Nomex curtain that had been there. This material flares nicely, first scorching, then whoomping into an ugly flame that quickly blackens the white ceiling tiles above it. He edges toward the door, watching the fire spread. Plenty of starting fuel in this room, with all that plastic ceiling tile, one entire wall of drapes, piles of surgical linens, the plastic laser-equipment cabinets. A dense, boiling cloud of noxious black smoke gathers rapidly along the ceiling like an angry octopus. He watches the sprinkler heads, but they do not fire. Good. Got them all. He opens the door of the locker containing the spare nitrous-oxide bottles, cracks the valves on the bottles, and then cuts on the main oxygen lines. He listens to make sure the hanging hose is hissing at full volume. Then he steps through the door and closes it behind him.

He figures he has about a minute before the flame-detector alarms go off. They're embedded in the building's security system, so he hadn't been able to cut them off. The sprinklers had been simpler — one maintenance valve. He takes one more thing out of his bag. It's a badly scorched folding steel clipboard. Inside is an equally scorched medical record, with the clinic's name and address printed on the forms. He removes the record, goes over to the water fountain on the wall, and soaks the cardboard jacket thoroughly. He puts it back into the metal clipboard and drops it into a metal record rack just outside of the surgery's door. He pats it once. He hopes it survives, because it's the key deception element — the bait, preburned to leave just the important bits legible.

He can hear the fire now, and the hallway walls are beginning to tremble. Fluorescent lights are starting to flare and dim, and the handle on the surgery door is hot to the touch. He listens at the vibrating door and smiles when he hears the familiar roar of an oxygen-fed fire. Getting really hot in there, he thinks, and it's going to get a whole lot hotter, especially when those altered nitrous-oxide bottles join the fun. The heavy plastic heads have been designed to melt through at only five hundred degrees and then release the flammable gas through a venturi nozzle that will feed the fire without exploding all at once. The bottles themselves have been designed to melt at one thousand degrees, which should happen about three to five minutes into the fire. By the time the fire department arrives, the humans in that room will have been reduced to carbonized goo. Something heavy goes down inside the burning surgery, so he grabs his bag, makes sure the doors to the office and records room are wide open, and then leaves through the clinic's back door. He walks around front, gets in his car, and drives off.

When he's two blocks away, he remembers what it was about the nurses and mutters an audible curse in German. The third nurse: the sexy brunette. Thirtysomething, the Ammies would call her. She hadn't been there tonight. But of course she had seen him previously, several times. She knew what he looked like before those Paki doctors had done their magic. And wasn't she the record keeper? He slows and pulls over in front of an apartment building, stops the car, turns out the lights, and tries to think. He should have noticed before this. And now he has a big loose end to attend to. The record keeper. Damn!

He sits there in the car, forcing his still-muddied brain to remember her name. Wall. Something Wall. Catherine? No. He instinctively turns his head when he hears sirens approaching up Kalorama Road. He leans sideways down into the front seat as the big engine set goes bawling by, its red and white strobes lighting up the inside of his car. The engine is pursued by a fire chief's car, its red dome light flashing. Another engine comes up the avenue a minute later. He looks at his watch. Alarm-system call, probably. But plenty of time for the gas-oxygen mix to have done its job.

But now he must make an important detour. One woman. Shouldn't be too hard, but still… He has her address in his computer. Sunday wasn't the first time he'd made a nocturnal visit to the clinic, courtesy of the nurses' sloppy security procedures. Just like every office he'd ever been in. Access codes written down in phone books. Keys and even spare keys on plainly visible hooks. He could go back to his apartment, look up the address, go there tonight even.

Another fire engine comes up Kalorama, preceded this time by a police car. Second alarm. Excellent. Big hot fire. The surgery and certainly the upstairs rooms, all fully engaged. The floor sagging. Those spare bottles puddling into nondescript slag. He waits for the fire engine to go by, checks both ways for police, and then pulls out. He goes one full block before remembering to turn his headlights back on. Damned anesthesia.

No, he decides. Not tonight. Of course he needs her dead, like the others, but he remembers the old Army maxim: If you want something bad, you'll probably get it bad.

No. He has seven weeks until der Tag. The big day. Plenty of time to set up one final incidental kill. He will do this correctly. Go there, do a proper reconnaissance; see precisely where she lives, get inside, see about alarms, neighbors, dogs — the usual. She doesn't know anything that can point to what's coming, and she certainly doesn't have his name. Assuming the records room and all its contents are destroyed, the only name that should survive the fire is the one planted deep in the metal record holder, along with the tantalizing but fragmentary transcript.

He brakes hard as some idiot Washington driver runs a red light and nearly broadsides him. He automatically looks to see if there's a police car, officers who might have seen the criminal, but of course there isn't one.

Because they're busy just now, he remembers with an icy smile. And soon, very soon, they'll really be busy.