Star Chamber Brotherhood (34 page)

“And this afternoon she’s out playing bridge, correct?”
 

“Until dinner,” Tucker confirmed. “So you should be okay for another hour. And the day shift for the nurse and bodyguard ends in about a half hour. Since the evening nurse doesn’t usually arrive till a quarter to five, you’ve got about fifteen minutes to get in, distract the nurse and the bodyguard, do your thing, and get out. If I’m right, they’ll be quite content to let you handle the change in Rocco’s sedation so they can get out the door.”

“Now, Sam, this is important: are you absolutely sure they’re expecting me?” Werner demanded.

“One hundred percent,” Tucker affirmed. “I monitored the call from the Medical Center this morning. They told the nurse you’d be arriving around four. It was a nifty bit of work—I didn’t know we had a woman on the team.”
 

“We don’t. That call was the real thing. Don’t ask.”

Without waiting for a response, Werner examined himself one more time in the rearview mirror and seized the door handle.
 

“Okay, Sam, wait for me where I showed you and pull up fast when you see me coming out.”

Then Werner opened the door and was gone.

****

Werner scanned both sides of the street for surveillance as he neared the corner, crossed the Commonwealth Avenue median strip, and approached Fred Rocco’s apartment building at a leisurely stroll.

He entered the lobby and found the uniformed doorman behind his antique desk, just as Sam Tucker had described.
 

“Hello,” Werner greeted him with a professional smile. “I’m Doctor Avery, here to see Mr. Rocco.”

“Oh, yes, the Roccos are on the third floor. The nurse said to send you right up.”

Werner continued to the rear of the lobby and entered the walnut-paneled elevator cabin. Unlike the elevator in Carol’s building, this one was newly waxed and polished and untainted by the stench of urine. And it ran.
 

On the third floor, the doors opened smoothly and silently onto a carpeted hallway with an apartment entrance at either end. The door to the right was already open, and, just inside the apartment, a tall, sturdily built plainclothesman wearing an ill-fitting gray suit inspected Werner through watery blue eyes. The cop’s round face and ruddy complexion gave him a youthful look, though Werner guessed him to be in his mid-thirties. Judging by his shabby suit, crew cut, and relative lack of ferocity, Werner took him for a local cop rather than a federal agent.
 

That was a good sign, Werner thought, because now was the moment of greatest danger. If the DSS had returned Rocco to his apartment with minimal security coverage as a ruse to lure his attackers for another attempt on his life, now would be the time when the trap would spring and agents would swarm over him. Werner felt his palms turn clammy and feared that beads of sweat might at any moment break out on his forehead or upper lip to raise the cop’s suspicion.
 

“Doctor Holt?” the policeman inquired.

“Doctor Holt wasn’t available,” Werner replied. “I’m Doctor Avery.”

“Identification, please.”

Werner handed him the fake medical license and Boston Medical Center I.D. card that he had purchased the day before, paying an exorbitant amount to a forger specializing in Medicare and Medicaid fraud.

The policeman gave the identification card a cursory look, returned it, and pulled a handheld radio from his belt.

“A Doctor Avery is here from the Medical Center in place of Doctor Holt. Do you want to come out or should I send him back to you?”
 

“Send him in, please,” came the response. Werner detected a chill in the nurse’s voice. Apparently the two did not get along together.
 

“It’s straight back at the end of the corridor, Doctor. You can’t miss it,” the officer advised, stepping aside to let the visitor pass. Werner let out a deep breath. Not only was there no trap, but the relaxed security seemed to indicate that the DSS had not even considered that Rocco’s attacker ,had targeted him personally and might return to finish him off.

As he traveled the length of the corridor, Werner lingered to survey the rooms that were open to view. He was at once amazed and appalled to see the measure of wealth on display in the Rocco flat. For someone who had claimed that, after leaving Kamas, he could not afford to retire on his government pension, Rocco appeared to have amassed sufficient wealth to purchase an impressive collection of oriental rugs, antique furniture, original oil paintings and sculptures, and a kitchen worthy of a Michelin star.
 

But then, Werner mused, who needs a pension if, as a senior DSS official, you could plunder the valuables of Moneymen whom the DSS had sent to the labor camp system by the thousands?

Werner located the guest room at the end of the hall but, to his surprise, the nurse was nowhere in sight. And, even more surprising, he found his patient wide awake and intermittently watching a widescreen television at the foot of his bed. The channel was tuned to a sport fishing contest somewhere in the Caribbean, and Werner envied the tanned fishermen reeling in a blue marlin from the pristine blue waters beneath his boat.

Werner took a deep breath, entered the sickroom, and greeted his patient with a supremely confident smile, adopting the persona of a medical authority who bestrides his specialty like a colossus.
 

“Good afternoon, Mr. Rocco. How are we feeling today?” he began.

Rocco examined the visitor cautiously for a moment, then seemed to relax and surrender himself into the care of the long-awaited pain specialist.
 

“Frankly, I wasn’t feeling much of anything until a day or so ago,” Rocco replied sourly. “In the hospital, I slept around the clock. But not anymore.”

His tone seemed petulant and oddly out of character for an official of his rank.

“And the pain?” Werner continued. “Has it been under control since your release?”

“Mostly,” Rocco answered. “My head is splitting, but that I can handle. It’s the nightmares that are killing me.” He looked into Werner’s eyes with an expression that was close to pleading. “Look, I haven’t had a decent sleep for the past three nights. I wake up after an hour or two in a cold sweat and that’s all the sleep I get until morning. The meds just aren’t working. I think you need to bump them up.”

“Other than the nightmares, how would you characterize your sleep, Mr. Rocco?” Werner went on, ignoring the patient’s suggestion. “Do you have difficulty falling asleep on your first attempt?”

“Falling asleep hasn’t been the issue, doctor. The problem is that, as soon as I get into a deep sleep, I land in a nightmare that seems as real as life. When I wake up, my pulse is racing, my pajamas are soaked with sweat, and I’m as wired as if I had three cups of coffee.”

“Would you mind describing the nightmare to me?” Werner interrupted. “Is it always the same?”

“Each one starts the same way. I find myself in this gray sort of mist, standing on a smooth, cold floor that feels slightly damp. I know I’m conscious even though I can’t see or hear a thing. And then I see these figures a short way off. As I try to get closer to them, they withdraw into the fog. So I follow them and the fog thickens and the light seems to dim. Before long, I get this awful sense of dread and I feel something brush against my legs, like a wild animal running past me. I try to figure out what it was when somebody shoves me from behind and I nearly trip and fall.”
 

Rocco stopped to take a breath and looked up.

“What then,” Werner prompted.

“Then I get the sense that these figures are all around me, closing in, and I can feel their foul breath on me as I hear them grunt and snarl. Then I feel hands or claws grabbing my clothes and ripping at them. I swing and kick at them like a wild man. But the more I lash out, the more they bite and tear into me and I realize that they’re having their fun at my expense. They don’t seem to be in any hurry to kill me. They just play with me like a cat with a mouse. In the end, I can feel them tearing off whole chunks of my flesh and eating me alive, only slowly, to prolong their enjoyment. That’s when I wake up.”

“Did you have nightmares like this before your…injuries,” Werner pressed.

“None like this,” Rocco replied anxiously. “I just don’t know how much more of this I can take, Doctor. It has to be from the medications, doesn’t it? Can’t you adjust them for me? I don’t care if the headaches get worse or the pain comes back. Just give me a decent night’s sleep without the damned zombies!”
 

Werner offered a solemn nod and asked Rocco to describe each of the locations where he felt physical pain.

“Rate the pain level of each on a scale from one to ten,” he added.

“The headaches are a six,” Rocco noted. “My back is a solid eight. The stitches in my scalp are a six or a seven, but only when the headaches let up. Otherwise they’re a five, sort of in the background.”

Werner listened patiently, now and then offering a sympathetic nod.
 

“All right, I think we have a pattern here. Mr. Rocco, I’m going to add a sedative to your pain medication. This particular combination has been widely studied and works rather well for disturbed sleep patterns in severely ill patients. I’m confident it will do the job for you. I’m going to inject it into your IV line right now.”

Werner opened his doctor’s bag, removed a single-dose vial of a clear liquid, loaded a syringe and injected it quickly but carefully into the IV line. As he did so, Werner felt an odd surge of euphoria followed by a sense of inner peace and acute mental clarity, as if he were the one receiving the drug rather than Rocco. Suddenly he realized that, no matter what happened to him from this moment on, his mission was accomplished. Unless Rocco was given a reversing agent immediately, in a matter of minutes he would be dead.

With a start Werner shook himself out of his reverie and continued.

“And if you do happen to wake up with another nightmare, Mr. Rocco, I’ll leave a prescription and some additional vials of midazolam behind so your nurse can repeat the procedure,” he assured the patient. “Now relax as best you can and get comfortable. Go ahead and close your eyes while I check your monitors.”
 

The moment Werner saw Rocco’s eyelids flutter and close, Werner stepped over to the door and quietly turned the deadbolt. Then he unwrapped an adhesive plaster, set it aside on the bedside table and pulled a double restraint loop out of his jacket pocket. He slipped the plastic loops deftly over Rocco’s wrists and pulled them closed, then just as quickly slapped the adhesive plaster over Rocco’s mouth.
 

He held his quarry by the wrists and pressed him down against the bed. Though Rocco’s eyes were now wide with terror, the midazolam was already working and his muscles were too weak to resist Werner’s weight.

“Oh, yes, about the restraints,” Werner continued in a soothing voice that even he found chillingly clinical. “They’re because I have something to give you…Warden.”

Frank Werner removed a paper disc from his shirt pocket, held it in the air for Rocco to see and placed it in the center of his chest.

“Sorry, Warden Rocco, but I must be brief.”

And in a flat judicial tone, Werner pronounced the Star Committee’s sentence while holding his face close to Rocco’s to ensure eye contact. A look of panic now distorted Rocco’s face and his body was rigid with fear.

“Frederick Rocco, you have been tried by a duly constituted jury of your peers and found guilty of crimes against humanity as warden of the Kamas labor camp. You have been sentenced to death. Prepare to meet your Maker. May he have mercy on your soul.”

Slowly, Rocco’s eyelids fluttered and closed and the muscles in his face went slack. Werner released his grip, reloaded the syringe from a new vial, injected the contents into the IV line and repeated with a third vial.

“Sweet dreams, Warden. I hope you have fun with your new friends on the other side,” he added, glancing at his watch.

Werner rose to inspect the vital signs monitor on the other side of the bed just as the monitor suddenly let out a series of piercing electronic beeps and strobe-like flashes. He crossed the room quickly and pressed the flashing red light to turn it off, then reset the monitor to a higher sensitivity threshold before turning the light back on. The beeps and flashes ceased but in the hallway he could hear footsteps approaching rapidly.

Seconds later someone tried to open the door.

“Doctor! It’s Nurse Mallory! Open the door!” she commanded, pounding hard on the heavy door.

“One moment,” Werner answered in a measured voice. “I seem to have locked it by mistake.”

Werner quickly inspected Rocco’s closed eyelids, pulled the plaster away from his mouth, cut the restraint loops, and slipped their remains into his jacket pocket. Without undue haste he unlocked the door.

A short redheaded woman of about fifty in a traditional white nurse’s uniform glared at him across the threshold while the moon-faced policeman peered over her shoulder. Her reddened face radiated anger and suspicion.

She demanded to see his identification.

“Certainly,” Werner answered with a respectful smile, producing the two cards he had shown the policeman upon entering.