Contract With God (25 page)

‘Andrea, listen to me very carefully.’

Andrea opened her eyes and looked at her. Lying on her bedding, clutching her leg and staring blankly ahead of her, the girl was clearly in agony. Harel made a superhuman effort to overcome her own paralysing fear of scorpions. It was a natural fear that any Israeli, as she was, born in Beersheba at the edge of the desert, would have learned as a young girl. She tried to put her foot on the floor but couldn’t.

‘Andrea. Andrea, on the list of allergies you gave me, were cardiotoxins included?’

Andrea howled again in pain.

‘How do I know? I carry the list because I can’t remember any more than ten names at a time. Fuuuuuuuuuuck! Doc, get down from there, for God’s sake, or Jehovah’s, or whatever. The pain is worse . . .’

Harel tried again to master her fear, putting a foot on the floor, and in two leaps she reached her own mattress.

I hope they’re not in here. Please God, don’t let them be in my sleeping bag
. . .

She kicked the sleeping bag to the floor, grabbed a boot in each hand and returned to Andrea.

‘I have to put on my boots and go over to the medicine cabinet. You’ll be all right in a minute,’ she said, pulling on her boots. ‘The poison is very dangerous, but it takes almost half an hour to kill a person. Hold on.’

Andrea did not reply. Harel looked up. Andrea had brought her hand up to her neck and her face was starting to turn blue.

Oh, Holy God! She
is
allergic. She’s going into anaphylactic shock.

Forgetting to put on her other boot, Harel knelt next to Andrea, her naked legs exposed to the floor. She had never been so aware of every square inch of her flesh. She looked for the place where the scorpions had stung Andrea and found two spots on the reporter’s left calf, two small holes, each surrounded by an inflamed area roughly the size of a tennis ball.

The tent flap opened and Father Fowler came in. He was also barefoot.

‘What’s going on?’

Harel was leaning over Andrea, trying to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

‘Father, please hurry. She’s in shock. I need epinephrine.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the cabinet at the end, second shelf from the top. There are some green vials. Bring me one and a syringe.’

She leaned over and blew more air into Andrea’s mouth, but the swelling in her throat was hindering the passage of air into her lungs. If Harel didn’t treat the shock straight away, her friend would be dead.

‘What the hell happened?’ said the priest, running to the cabinet. ‘She’s in shock?’

‘Get out,’ Doc screamed at the half-dozen sleepy heads peering into the infirmary. Harel didn’t want one of the scorpions to escape and find some other victim. ‘A scorpion stung her, Father. There are three in here right now. Be careful.’

Father Fowler flinched slightly at the news and moved carefully towards the doctor with the epinephrine and syringe. Harel immediately injected five CCs into Andrea’s naked thigh.

Fowler grabbed a five-gallon jar of water by the handle.

‘You take care of Andrea,’ he told the doctor. ‘I’ll find them.’

Harel now turned all her attention to the young reporter, although by this point all she could do was observe her condition. It would be the epinephrine that would have to work its miraculous effect. As soon as the hormone entered Andrea’s bloodstream, the nerve endings in her cells would start firing. The fat cells in her body would begin to break up the lipids to free extra energy, her heart rate would increase, her blood would carry more glucose, her brain would start producing dopamine, and most importantly, her bronchial tubes would dilate and the swelling in her throat disappear.

With a loud gulp, Andrea took her first breath of air on her own. To Dr Harel, the sound was almost as beautiful as the three dry thuds of Father Fowler’s gallon jug that she had heard in the background as the medicine continued to work. When Father Fowler sat down on the floor next to her, Doc had no doubt that the three scorpions were now reduced to three stains on the floor.

‘And the antidote? Something to deal with the poison?’ asked the priest.

‘Yes, but I don’t want to inject her just yet. It’s made from the blood of horses that have been exposed to hundreds of scorpion stings so that eventually they become immune. The vaccine always carries traces of the toxin, and I don’t want to risk another shock.’

Fowler watched the young Spaniard. Her face was slowly starting to look normal again.

‘Thank you for everything you’ve done, Doctor,’ he said. ‘I won’t forget it.’

‘No problem,’ replied Harel, who was by now all too conscious of the danger they had been through, and began to shake.

‘Will there be any after-effects?’

‘No. Her body can fight against the poison now.’ She raised the green vial. ‘This is pure adrenalin, it’s like giving her system a weapon. All the organs in her body will double their capacity and prevent her from choking. She’ll be all right in a couple of hours, although she will feel like shit.’

Fowler’s face relaxed a little. He pointed to the door.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘I’m no idiot, Father. I’ve been in the desert hundreds of times in my country. The last thing I do at night is make sure all the doors are closed. In fact, I double check. This tent is more secure than a Swiss bank account.’

‘Three scorpions. All at the same time. In the middle of the night . . .’

‘Yes, Father. That’s the second time someone has tried to kill Andrea.’

OUTSKIRTS OF WASHINGTON, DC

 

 

Ever since he had started hunting terrorists, Orville Watson had taken a series of basic precautions: making sure he had telephone numbers, addresses and postal codes under different names, then buying a house through an unnamed foreign association that only a genius would have been able to trace to him. An emergency hideout in case things got ugly.

Of course, a safe house only you know of has its problems. For a start, if you want to stock it with supplies then you have to do so on your own. Orville took care of that. Once every three weeks he would take to the house cans, meat for the freezer, and a stack of DVDs of the latest films. He’d then get rid of anything that was out of date, lock up the place and leave.

It was paranoid behaviour . . . no question about it. The only mistake Orville had ever made, other than letting himself be followed by Nazim, was that the last time he’d been there he’d forgotten the bag of Hershey bars. It was an unwise addiction, not only because of the 330 calories per bar, but because an emergency order to Amazon might let the terrorists know that you were inside the house they were watching.

But Orville hadn’t been able to help himself. He could’ve done without food, water, internet access, his collection of sexy photos, his books or his music. But when he’d entered the house in the early hours of Wednesday morning, thrown the fireman’s coat into the garbage bin and looked into the cupboard where he stored his chocolate and saw that it was empty, his heart had sunk. He couldn’t go three or four months without chocolate, having been totally hooked ever since his parents’ divorce.

I could’ve had a worse addiction
, he thought, trying to calm himself.
Heroin, crack, voting Republican.

Orville had never tried heroin in his life, but not even the overwhelming craziness of that drug couldn’t compare to the uncontrollable rush he felt when he heard the sound of foil crackling as he unwrapped his chocolate.

If Orville were to go all Freudian, he might have decided that this was because the last thing the Watson family had done together before the divorce was to spend the Christmas of 1993 at his uncle’s house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As a special treat his parents took Orville to the Hershey factory, which was only fourteen miles from Harrisburg. Orville grew weak at the knees when they first entered the building and absorbed the aroma of the chocolate. He was even given some Hershey bars with his name on them.

But now Orville was even more worried by another sound: that of breaking glass, if his ears weren’t playing tricks on him.

He carefully pushed aside a small pile of chocolate wrappers and got out of bed. He had resisted touching the chocolate for three hours, a personal record, but now that he’d finally given in to his addiction, he planned to go all out. And again, if he’d gone all Freudian about it, he would have worked out that he had eaten seventeen chocolates, one for each member of his company who had died in Monday’s attack.

But Orville didn’t believe in Sigmund Freud and his head trips. For a case of broken glass, he believed in Smith & Wesson. That’s why he kept a .38 Special next to his bed.

He picked up the gun and an object that sat next to it on the night table. It looked like a key chain, but it was a simple remote control with two buttons. The first set off a silent alarm at the police station. The second set off a siren throughout the estate.

‘It’s so loud it could wake up Nixon and get him tap dancing,’ the man installing the alarm had said.

‘Nixon’s buried in California.’

‘Now you know how powerful it is.’

Orville pressed both buttons, not wanting to take any chances. On hearing no siren, he wanted to beat the shit out of the cretin who had installed the system and sworn that it was impossible to disconnect.

Shit, shit, shit
, Orville swore to himself, clutching the gun.
What the hell do I do now? The plan was to get here and be safe. What about the mobile . . .?

It was on the night table on top of an old copy of
Vanity Fair
.

His breathing became shallow and he began to sweat. When he’d heard the breaking glass - probably in the kitchen - he’d been sitting in his bed, in the dark, playing
The Sims
on his laptop and sucking on the chocolate still stuck to the wrappers. He hadn’t even realised that the air-conditioning had stopped a few minutes earlier.

Now, as his fear and the sticky Washington summer drenched him in sweat, his grasp on the gun became slippery and each step he took felt precarious. There was no doubt that Orville had to get out of there as quickly as possible.

He crossed the dressing room and looked out into the hallway of the top floor. Nobody there. There was no way to get down to the first floor other than the stairs, but Orville had a plan. At the end of the hall, on the opposite side to the stairs, there was a small window, and outside a rather puny cherry tree that refused to bloom. No matter. The branches were thick and near enough to the window to allow someone as nonathletic as Orville to try to descend that way.

He got down on all fours and tucked the gun into the tight elastic band of his shorts, then made his large body crawl the ten feet across the rug to the window. Another noise from the floor below confirmed that someone really had broken into the house.

Opening the window, he gritted his teeth the way thousands of people do each day when they are attempting not to make any noise. Fortunately, their lives don’t depend on it; unfortunately, his most certainly did. He could already hear footsteps coming up the stairs.

Abandoning all caution, Orville stood up, opened the window, and leaned out. The branches were roughly five feet away, and Orville had to stretch right out even for his fingers to graze one of the thicker ones.

Without thinking twice, he put one foot on the window sill, pushed off and made a leap that not even the kindest person watching could have termed graceful. His fingers managed to grab hold of the branch, but in jumping the gun slipped into his shorts, and after a brief, cold contact with what he called ‘little Timmy’, it slipped down his leg and fell into the garden.

At that moment the branch broke.

Orville’s full weight landed on his rear end, making quite a bit of noise. More than thirty per cent of the cloth of his shorts didn’t survive the fall, as he later realised when he saw the bleeding cuts on his behind. But at that particular moment he didn’t notice them because his only concern was to get that same behind as far away as possible from the house, so he headed for the gate of his property, some sixty-five feet down the hill. He didn’t have the keys to the gate, but he’d chew his way through it if necessary. Halfway down the hill, the fear attacking him inside was replaced by a sense of accomplishment.

He couldn’t believe it, but the gate was open. Reaching his arms forward in the dark, Orville headed for the exit.

Suddenly, from the shadows of the wall surrounding the property a dark form emerged and crashed against his face. Orville felt the full force of the blow, and heard a horrible crunching sound as his nose broke. Whimpering and grabbing at his face, Orville fell to the ground.

A figure came running down the path from the house and placed a pistol at the back of his neck. The move was unnecessary since Orville had already passed out. Standing next to his body was Nazim, nervously holding the shovel with which he had hit Orville after assuming the classic stance of a batter facing a pitcher. It had been a perfect swing. Nazim had been a good hitter when he played baseball at school, and in an absurd sort of way he thought that his coach would have been proud to see him make such a fantastic swing in the dark.