Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

She nodded. “Do you have them?”

The sergeant whisked his hands over Drummond’s pockets without finding the bottle. “I’ll be right back.” He tore out of the infirmary.

Genevieve compressed Drummond’s chest wall by about three inches, or enough to break a rib, the desired amount. Compressions any weaker were ineffective. The point of squeezing the rib cage, after all, was to pump the heart.

She had repeated the process fifteen times, at a rate of approximately one hundred compressions per minute, when Drummond decided that it was time to end the cardiac arrest act he’d initiated by swallowing eight of his ten remaining pills. The experimental drug’s beta-blocker components-atenolol and metoprolol-had weakened his pulse to the point that it was undetectable, at least by harried marine guards and a medic in an under-equipped infirmary. He’d augmented the effect with a ploy as old as predators and prey, holding his breath.

He may have done the job too well, he thought, as he tried to get up from the examination table: A chill crept over his body, leaving him cold, clammy, and feeling weighted down, as if he were at the bottom of a deep sea. His extremities stung and the pressure neared skull-crushing. Everything around him blurred. The hiss of the overhead lamps, Genevieve’s breathing, and the rustling of her lab coat had the effect of trains blowing past. And both vomit and diarrhea burned within him.

Had he miscalculated the dosage?

Highly likely. His faculty for making calculations lately had been like an old television set that gets reception only at certain angles. Still, getting reception at all had been fortuitous. His son was locked in a detention room. And any moment might bring the return of the Cavalry agent who had tried to kill them-what was his name?

Steve?

Stanley?

Sandy?

Like the beach.

Saint Lucia’s beaches were as white as sugar.

Until he’d seen them for himself, he’d thought “sugar sand” was just the hyperbolical concoction of an advertising copywriter.

Drummond felt his thinking careening off the rails.

What matters, he told himself, is that Steve or Stanley or whoever will return , almost certainly with backup from the misguided Cavalry. And the marine guards here would prove no more potent than scarecrows in defense.

The world seemed to revert to its normal pace.

Drummond exhaled, with a cough, for effect.

Genevieve jumped, pleasantly surprised.

He tried to raise himself on his elbows and fell flat.

“Easy,” she said.

“I accidentally swallowed some …” he said just above a whisper before letting his voice trail off.

She leaned closer to hear. “Yes?”

He shot up his left arm, encircling her neck, clamping the crook of his elbow at her trachea.

She tried to cry out.

With his left hand he grasped his right bicep, placing his right hand behind her head, then brought his elbows together, applying as much pressure as he could generate to both sides of her neck, restricting the blood flow to her brain.

Unconscious, she sagged against him. He slid off the examination table, keeping a grip on her so that she wouldn’t fall. His knees buckled, but by force of will he remained standing.

He hoisted her onto the table. She would regain consciousness in seconds. The marines who had brought him here would return sooner.

There was simply no time for infirmity.

He took the white blanket from the foot of the examination table and cast it over her. The marines would mistake her for him, at least for a few seconds.

He crouched behind the crash cart, the portable trolley with the dimensions of a floor safe. It contained all equipment and medication required for cardiopulmonary emergencies, and he would need one of the meds momentarily. In the shorter term, the cart would hide him. He rotated it so that its drawers faced him.

Sergeant King entered at a jog. On seeing the fully covered body on the examination table, he froze. “Damn it,” he said to himself.

Hidden by the portion of the blanket hanging from the examination table, Drummond slowly opened the crash cart’s drawers fractions of an inch at a time, searching for succinylcholine, the swift-acting neuromuscular blocker used to facilitate endotracheal intubation. Drummond intended to use a small dose of the drug to temporarily paralyze King.

The sergeant wandered toward the table. “Ginny?” he asked at a whisper, as if worried about disturbing the corpse. “Where’d you go?”

Drummond found three pencil-sized preloaded succinylcholine syringes, each packing an eighteen-gauge needle.

Warily, King peeled the blanket from the head of the examination table. He recoiled, drawing his gun and shouting, “Flint!”

Drummond reached beneath the table and slung the needle sidearm into King’s calf. The sergeant looked down in mystification-he probably felt no more pain than if he’d been stung by an insect. Drummond sprang, hitting the floor on a roll, then reached and tapped the plunger, driving succinylcholine into King’s muscle.

King twisted away with such force that the needle jerked free and flew across the infirmary. It struck a cabinet on the far wall, lodging there like a dart.

Flint ran in, gun drawn. King pointed, superfluously, to Drummond, then crumpled to the floor, where he lay, unmoving.

Glad of the diversion, Drummond dove back behind the crash cart.

Flint pivoted on his heels, firing. Strips of linoleum slapped Drummond. The air clouded with sawdust that had been a chunk of the examination table.

From his knees, Drummond shoved the red cart at Flint.

The marine spun, shooting and ringing the face of it. The bullet exited through the uppermost drawer, whistling past Drummond’s ear, followed by a spray of glass and a milky white substance that smelled of alcohol.

Pushing the cart ahead of himself, Drummond picked up the gun King had dropped.

Another bullet pounded into the cart.

Drummond said, “I have a clean shot at you, son. Neither of us wants me to take it. So, slowly, set your sidearm down on the floor and kick it toward me.”

“Mr. Clark, sir, there is no chance whatsoever that you can get out of here, so-”

Drummond fired, aiming to Flint’s right. The wall a few inches from Flint’s right ear exploded into plaster dust. The man dropped to the floor.

Drummond tracked him through the gunsight. “We’re making progress. Now, all you have to do is surrender your weapon.”

Ashen, independent of the haze of plaster dust, the marine complied.

As Drummond reached for the weapon, something hard slammed into the back of his head. He fell against the crash cart, toppling it. As he hit the floor, he saw the metal bed rail swung like a cricket bat by Genevieve.

Meanwhile the crash cart’s five metal drawers dropped open and pounded him, the sharp corner of one ripping through his shirt and slicing into his chest. All manner of medical supplies rained onto him.

He implored himself to maintain focus; he had one last play in mind.

White light devoured his consciousness.

Snipers aim for the “apricot,” better known as the medulla oblongata, the part of the brainstem that controls the heart and lungs. To reach Charlie Clark’s, Gretchen Lanier needed to fire from the barely opened window of the third-floor hotel room, across and through more than three hundred yards of parkland, and into the barred detention rooms.

If only every job were so simple, she thought. A year ago in Afghanistan, she’d recorded a kill from 2,267 yards away, or 1.29 miles, on icy and mountainous terrain.

She dropped to a kneeling position at the foot of the bed. In her year and a half of sniper school, her instructors had placed almost as much emphasis on proficiency in camouflage and concealment as on marksmanship. More often than not it involved wearing a ghillie suit in order to pass for a bush or clump of weeds. Tonight’s camo involved surrounding the rifle with a well-placed pillow and the blankets bunched just so. Wrapping the comforter over the works simulated a person lying in the bed she and Stanley had rolled against the window.