The fifth vial

CHAPTER 39

The moment Natalie saw Berenger, the missing pieces of her life began flying into place. Instantly consumed by a hatred more powerful than any passion she had ever known, she slowly lowered her hands and stood, arms folded, watching as he impassively surveyed the carnage and illness surrounding them. Then he turned to her.

"Our friend in the village, Father Francisco, radioed our friend Sergeant Barbosa here at the hospital that a beautiful, sexy tree hugger with clean, new boots had made it out to Dom Angelo. When I heard Barbosa's description of the woman, I had a funny feeling that it might be you. You are to be commended for making it this far."

"Go to hell, Doug," she said, barely able to keep herself from leaping at him in an effort to claw his eyes out before the Arab soldiers cut her down. "You're a goddamn murderer — a killer."

Her mind was racing. Over their years together as mentor and pupil, then as friends, she had developed a strong sense of the man. Now, she struggled to integrate what she knew of him with his involvement in this place. There was little chance, she reasoned, that she was going to survive — no, she immediately corrected, there was no chance at all. But somehow she had to get at him. Somehow she had to take advantage of his arrogance, his love of power, and his enormous ego. Somehow she had to rattle him — ridicule and goad him into making a mistake. No matter what, she was not going to die passively.

"George Washington killed for a cause," he was saying. "So did Eisenhower, and Truman, and Moses, and Mandela, and Simon Bolivar. And Lincoln sanctioned the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the cause of what was right."

"Oh, please, spare me your feeble justifications for being an amoral monster."

The surgeon's eyes flashed, and she knew that she had stung him. It wouldn't be the last time, she vowed.

Berenger turned from her to the director of the hospital.

"Santoro, where's Oscar?"

"My stomach. I'm sick…so sick."

The surgeon began sputtering and coughing up bile and acid.

"Damn it, Xavier, where is he?"

"Don't…know."

"He's dead," Natalie said matter-of-factly. "I shot him. Right here." She pointed to her eye. "He was a pig and a murderer, just like you."

"And you, my dear lady, are an irritating, self-serving little bug, a gnat, aptly named and certainly not deserving of the status of a Guardian."

"Not deserving of what?"

"Tell me what you poisoned these people with."

"I don't know. A little shaman I met in the forest put together a special something for me." She glanced around the room. "He should have listened to me, though. I told him to make it a lot stronger."

Berenger crossed to where the silver-haired woman lay moaning and clutching her middle. He glanced down with some disgust at the body lying next to her and then carefully stepped around it.

"Dorothy," he said without a word of sympathy for her condition, "can you work?"

"I…I can't stop getting sick," she managed. "It feels like my stomach is about to tear in two. It was something in the food at lunch. I'm sure of it. I've been hallucinating, too. Poor Tony couldn't stop throwing up, either. How's he doing?"

"Not so well. Dorothy, I need you. I was counting on you to do the anesthesia for both cases. Is that the woman over there?"

At Berenger's gesture in her direction, Sandy began to shriek hysterically.

"No! Please no! I have a little boy. He needs me. Please! I beg you. Don't hurt me!"

"Oh, that's just sweet, Doug," Natalie said. "She has a little boy. Aren't you proud of yourself?"

"Shut up!"

Berenger quickly whispered something to the man in the regal robe, who then nodded in the direction of two of his men, and issued a quick order. With Sandy continuing to scream piteously, the soldiers wheeled her away and into the farthest operating room. In moments, there was silence.

With Berenger's help, the anesthesiologist managed to get to her feet. There was no way to keep her from seeing Tony's corpse.

"Oh, dear," she gasped. "Poor man."

"Dorothy, listen," Berenger said, "we'll take care of Tony's family. Real good care. Now, you've got to pull yourself together. The prince will be here any minute. He's gone into congestive heart failure and may be in early cardiogenic shock. We need to move quickly, and to do that, we need you. When this is over, when you have helped give one of the most enlightened and powerful rulers in the world back his life, you will never have to work again if you don't want to. You will live in luxury for the rest of your days. Can you do it?"

"I…I can try."

As the woman headed unsteadily out of the dining room, holding her midsection and shaking her head as if trying to clear it, Natalie noticed that Luis, white as a sheet, had shifted position and was working his hand underneath him toward his gun. She shook her head in sharp warning, but he either did not notice, or else did not care.

"So," Natalie said, anxious to distract her mentor, "the paper I was supposed to deliver, the international transplant meeting — it was all calculated to get me down here."

"If there wasn't a meeting here, I modestly admit I would have found another way. You see, it wasn't mere chance and a passion for long-legged track stars that led me to connect with you when you were at Harvard. It was — "

"Let me guess. It was a blood test that was drawn on me at a White-stone lab. A green-top tube, to be specific."

Berenger looked genuinely surprised.

"It appears that when the procedures here are concluded, you and I will have to have a little discussion as to who knows what about green-top tubes."

"I know that you are a murderer — a serial killer, no better than any of the rest of them."

"Think what you wish," Berenger said. "We prefer to think of ourselves as involved physicians who are righting a serious wrong in the system."

"Oh, please."

"You were a twelve out of twelve tissue match with a person we knew would one day need a new lung — a person whose work is about to revolutionize medicine as we know it. Twelve out of twelve, Natalie. That means almost no nasty anti-rejection drugs to slow him down. All mankind will be the richer for his work. Without your lung he well might have died."

"So you took me out to lunch and acted as if you actually cared about me."

"We needed to keep you on a fairly short leash. I ask you, who deserves that lung of yours more, you or him?"

"That's not your decision to make, Doug."

"Isn't it? You know, until recently, I actually tried to stick up for you. There was another candidate — a laborer, who was an eleven out of twelve match for our man. But then, when you showed how crass and arrogant you were by trying to stab Dr. Renfro in the back and subsequently getting kicked out of school and your residency, it was clear you had denigrated yourself, and lowered yourself far beneath any Guardian."

"Guardian? Guardian of what?…What in the hell are you talking about?"

"I wouldn't expect you to know."

"What kind of guardian?…Hey, wait a minute, are you talking about guardians as in Plato's guardians? The philosopher kings? Surely you don't think that you…oh, but you do, don't you? You consider yourself a philosopher king." Natalie knew that in her campaign to disrupt and rattle the man, she had just been given a weapon. "How many of you are there, Doug? How many philosopher murderer kings? Are you part of some sort of secret society — a Plato club?"

Berenger's expression left no doubt that he had been gored.

"You are in no position to be mocking," he said. "The Guardians of the Republic are among the greatest, most talented, most enlightened men and women on earth. By taking over the decision-making relative to the allocation of organs, we have done more good for mankind than you could ever imagine."

"The Guardians of the Republic! Oh, this is too much! Do you have an anthem, Doug? A password? A decoder ring? How about a secret grip and merit badges?"

"Enough!"

Berenger took a single step forward and slapped Natalie across the face with all his strength, dropping her to one knee.

Natalie, her eyes watering from the blow, ran her tongue over the corner of her mouth and tasted blood.

"That was brave, Doug," she said, standing. "I hope you broke your hand."

"No such luck."

"Too bad. So, tell me, what harm did that poor woman in there ever do to anyone that would cause your precious Guardians to sacrifice her?"

"You'll never understand."

Try me.

"She's a Producer — the lowest of all social groups. Compare the value of her life to that of the great man she is about to save. Either she must die, or he must. It's as simple as that. And I say it is no contest. Organs must be allocated to save the lives of those who can and will best serve mankind."

"You left out the part about being able to pony up a gazillion dollars as well."

"Wrong! Many of the Guardians we save don't have that kind of money."

"Such charity. And here I was so surprised and proud of you when you put Tonya in her place and treated that poor fellow who couldn't stop smoking so humanely."

"If you hadn't been standing there I would have kissed Tonya for being so right on the mark. I wanted to kill that bastard Culver for wasting that heart. I wanted to kill him on the spot. I wanted to open his chest with a dull blade, remove that precious heart I had been forced by the system to place there, and put it into someone who deserved it more and would take better care of it."

Out of the corner of her eye, Natalie could see that Luis had reached his gun and was slowly maneuvering it to where he could pull it from beneath his leg. His color had, if possible, worsened, and his eyes looked nearly lifeless. Nearly.

"So, Douglas the Great," Natalie said, "the reason you didn't just have me killed and buried down here is? No, wait, don't bother answering, Lord Philosopher King. I know. I'm alive just in case, by some fluke, my lung is rejected or fails to function for whatever reason, you want me incubating the other one."

"How long is this poison going to last?" Berenger demanded. "I would say go fuck yourself, but I have high hopes of being elevated to the exalted ranks of Guardian once more, and I wouldn't want to say anything so crude that it hurts my chances."

Natalie could see that the corner of Berenger's eye had begun to twitch. Another hit. Turning his back on her, he ordered Santoro to his feet.

"Come on, Xavier, I need you in the OR."

Santoro tried to stand, slipped on the products of his own sickness, fell, and began to giggle and moan at the same time. At that moment, a helicopter swung low over the hospital, then off to the landing strip. One of the soldiers was dispatched to guide the latest arrivals in.

"Damn it, Santoro!" Berenger snapped. "Get up, get showered and dressed, and get ready to assist me in the OR!"

He grabbed the man by the back of the shirt and pulled him rudely to his feet. The cleansing shower would never happen. Luis raised his gun and, before either of the remaining two soldiers could react, fired from twenty feet away. The bullet caught Santoro squarely in the chest, knocking him back into an easy chair, an odd smile on his lips. A second shot, probably meant for Berenger, shattered a window.

"No!" Natalie screamed as the two soldiers riddled Luis with automatic fire from their machine guns, causing his body to jerk about like a marionette. "No!"

Natalie wanted to rush to him, but in truth, there was nothing she could do, and the Arab soldiers were extremely jittery. Instead, she moved off to one side and satisfied herself that her hero was at least at peace, as she, herself, would undoubtedly be before too much longer.

Berenger was clearly unraveling. He stormed over to where Vincent's girlfriend lay, violently snapping her head and kicking her feet at whatever hallucinations were harassing her.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

The woman glanced up at him and began laughing hysterically. Then, without warning, she threw up, spattering his shoes. Contemptuously, he wiped them on her pants leg, and then turned toward the patio entrance where three soldiers rushed in wheeling a stretcher on which lay a young, copper-skinned, mustachioed man, with a portable monitor defibrillator and oxygen mask in place. His breathing was labored. Behind him came an Arab physician in scrubs and a white coat, and a young, lean, black man pushing a small, glass-front case, mounted on wheels, and containing a number of units of blood.

"You'll be working in OR one as usual, Randall," Berenger said to the man. "The bypass pump is just as you left it. You know where everything else is. Be careful getting ready, but do it quickly."

He patted the pump tech on the shoulder, hurried over to the prince, and listened to his heart and lungs.

"I don't like this," he said to the physician in English. "I don't like this at all. Where are Khanduri and the nurses?"

"We flew over them. They're in two cars, about five miles from here — on that winding road, half an hour, maybe. No more than that."

"You should have put them all on the jet and flown straight in."

"You heard the pilot back in Rio. He said the flaps weren't working right, and it was too dangerous."

"Christ. When did the prince start to slip?"

"At the airport, just as we were transferring him to the helicopter."

"Okay, okay, we can still pull all this together. Can you assist me in the OR?"

"I dare not leave the prince, especially when he is in this condition."

"All right. Get him into the recovery room and see what you can do to stabilize him until Khanduri gets here. Wait, what's the minister's name?"

"Minister al-Thani."

"I'm going to ask him if he can assist me in the operating room."

"I don't think that would be proper, no matter what," the physician said. "He is — "

"I need help, damn it! I need another pair of hands, even if the person they're attached to doesn't know anything about — No, no, wait. Never mind. Just get the prince onto the monitor in the recovery room and get him stabilized. I'm going to get started and have the heart harvested and ready when Khanduri and the nurses arrive."

"But who will assist you?"

Berenger actually may have smiled.

"She will," he said, pointing at Natalie.