Leighton Gage - Buried Strangers

He was seated at the table, sweating profusely, and shak-ing his head. It wasn’t that hot in the room, but he was blot-ting his forehead with a handkerchief clutched in a meaty left hand about the size of a boxing glove. His other hand was cuffed at the wrist. A chain ran from the cuff to an eye-bolt welded into the top of the table.

“Crap,” Delegado Moreira said, “You’re Ribeiro. Stop denying it.”

Ribeiro kept shaking his head.

“No way,” he said.

Moreira looked up and smiled at Silva. He introduced the young guy as Renato Wagner, the man who’d spotted Ribeiro.

“Good work,” Silva said, “but now I think it would be bet-ter if you left us alone.”

Wagner frowned, but Moreira winked knowingly at Silva.

“I think we’ll take a stroll down the hall,” Moreira said. “You can’t hear a damned thing from down there. The door to this room is steel. It has a way of dampening anything that happens inside.”

He took Wagner firmly by the arm and led him into the corridor. Hector closed the door and leaned against it. Silva sat down at the table.

“Now,” he said, “let’s talk.”

CLAUDIA WAS laying out her instruments when Bittler hurried into the operating suite. He wasn’t wearing scrubs, a mask, or gloves. That alone was enough to tell her that some-thing was terribly wrong.

“Teobaldo,” he snapped to the anesthesiologist, “Leave us.

I haven’t got him completely stabilized,” Teobaldo said, pointing at an unconscious Arnaldo.

“I don’t care,” Bittler said. “Go. I’ll call you when we need you.”

Once the door had closed behind Teobaldo, Bittler came around to her side of the operating table, leaned forward, and spoke in a harsh whisper.

“They’re onto Roberto.”

Claudia went to the double door and opened it. Teobaldo was bending over, his ear to the crack.

He looked up at her sheepishly.

“Go to your office,” she said. “I’ll call you there.”

“And if the guy on the table dies?”

“He dies. Go.”

When he’d taken off down the corridor, she closed the door and turned back to Bittler.

“Tell me,” she said, “tell me everything.”

Bittler’s account of his conversation with Ribeiro made Claudia angry, angrier than she could ever remember. But she suppressed her rage, and stood listening to his ration-alizations as if she accepted them at face value.

She recognized the game was over, recognized they’d lost, but the man in front of her, a man she’d once respected, was so blinded by self-importance and convictions of intellectu-al superiority he couldn’t see the disaster in its true light. If he’d listened to her in the first place, it would never have come to this. Roberto would have been long dead. The deba-cle was his fault, Horst Bittler’s fault, and no one else’s.

“They haven’t caught him yet,” he was saying, “and with a little luck they never will. But we’ll have to act quickly, just in case. If they do catch him, we can’t count on him to keep his mouth shut. The records are a problem. They’ve been good enough for a superficial inspection, but they won’t stand up to in-depth analysis. We’ll have to destroy them.”

“How about the others?” she said. “Gretchen? Teobaldo? That pilot you’ve recently taken into our confidence? What about them? What’s to prevent one of them making a deal and selling us out?”

He considered that for a moment. “They’re expendable,” he said.

“And I am, too, I suppose.”

He avoided her eyes.

“No, Claudia, of course not. I’ve always regarded you as my partner. Now, stop talking foolishness and let’s get busy. God knows how much time we’ve got to do it all. A few days at the minimum, I suspect. Unless they catch up with Roberto. If that happens, they could be here sooner. We have to make sure that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, for them to find. First the records. We could-”

“Set a fire in the archives? Burn down part of the building?

Yes, yes, an excellent idea. Destroying part of the build-ing would lend verisimilitude. And the holding cells? How can we justify the holding cells?”

“Claim that we intended to extend the clinic’s services to the treatment of the violently insane? That we had the cells constructed for that?”

“No. No, they’ll see through that in an instant.”

“They will. But can they prove otherwise?”

“You’re right. Proof is all.”

But she’d only been toying with him.

“You’re a piece of work,” she said.

“What?” His eyebrows climbed almost to his hairline. She’d never spoken to him like that. He flushed a deep red.

“I said you’re a piece of work.”

“How dare you?”

“I told you more than once to get rid of Roberto. But, no, you thought you knew better.”

“There was no reason to believe-”

“There was. There was every reason to believe that the man was a liability. You just didn’t want to see it.”

“I resent your tone.”

“And I resent your actions. I spent years preparing to practice my profession, and now you’ve put it in jeopardy through your lack of judgment. What am I supposed to do with my life from here on in? Tell me that!”

“You’re overreacting, Claudia. You’ll continue as you’ve always done. I will endeavor to forgive your lapse in courtesy. Now, if there’s nothing more. .”

She shook her head in disbelief.

“Do you actually believe we can carry on? Just clean the place up and act as if nothing has happened?”

“We have the Kramer woman upstairs, waiting for her new heart. Get Teobaldo back in here and remove his.” He pointed at Arnaldo’s recumbent form. “Then, while the corpse is being dismembered, we can burn the body of the other Indian brat. But we’ll have to clean his ashes out of the oven ourselves. Damn Roberto Ribeiro!”

“You intend to go forward? You intend to harvest this heart and then implant it in the Kramer woman? After what you’ve just told me?”

“Why not? They won’t get onto us as quickly as all that. No use wasting what we have. Don’t forget that we already have the Kramer woman’s money. It’s against my principles to give it back.”

The man was insane. Strange that she’d never noticed it before.

“I am Chief Inspector Mario Silva,” the man in the gray suit said, “and you”-he put his finger on Roberto’s chest-“are Roberto Ribeiro.”

Roberto shrank away from the pressure of the finger and shook his head. “I’m not,” he said. “It’s a case of misshapen identity.”

“The word you’re looking for, you filho da puta, is mis-taken, mistaken identity, not misshapen identity, and you are Roberto Ribeiro, and if you deny it one more time, I’m going to hurt you.”

The cop came no closer; he didn’t shout, he didn’t bluster. But, somehow, Roberto felt as if the temperature in the room had taken a plunge. He looked into the man’s eyes-blacker than coal-and shivered. Seconds before, he’d been sweat-ing like a pig, and now he shivered. It didn’t make sense. It was almost as if his body were responding on some primitive level.

“Personally,” Silva said, “I don’t think you deserve to live. The way I figure it, you’ve been complicit in the murder of dozens, maybe even scores, of people.”

Roberto shook his head. “You got the wrong guy. I never even heard of-”

Silva hit him in the face with the back of his hand. The blow came so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Roberto didn’t have time to raise his arm, or even turn his head. He put his free hand up to touch his nose. It wasn’t bleeding and it didn’t seem to be broken, but it stung like hell.