Michael Palmer - The fifth vial

Clutching the pistol, feeling detached, almost dreamlike, he inched out from under the van. He wondered what John Hamman had been thinking and feeling just before he charged the machine-gun nest or whatever he did to earn a posthumous medal and a godforsaken road named after him.

Ben pushed himself upright. If he was going to move, it had to be now, while the door to the van was open. Was there any way to stop — any way he could just slip back to his room and let them proceed, at least for the time being, with whatever was planned for the terrified woman named Sandy? In exchange for leaving them all he would be keeping alive his hope of exposing the horror of Whitestone. He hefted the.38 in his hand and moved to the rear of the van.

"Hey, Billy, what gives?" another voice from within the van asked, as if the woman's outburst had never happened.

"Paulie, hey, whassapnin?"

"Nothin' much, Billy. Jes playin' a little hearts with Vincent an' Connie t'pass the time."

Ben moved silently to the corner of the van. He had never fired a gun at anything but a range target and once a couple of bottles. Now he would have to take out the guard at the doorway and then climb over his body to shoot three killers before they could reach their weapons. Did he have any chance? At some level he knew the answer was no, but he felt unable to stop.

"You ridin' shotgun on the flight tomorrow?" the guard asked.

"All four of us."

"Oh, hey, Smitty, I didn't even see you there."

"Hi, Billy. Quiet out there?"

Five.

Ben lowered his gun as sanity took over.

"Must be big stuff," Billy was saying. "Put in a word for me, Vincent, will ya? Doin' security here gets a little wearin'. In case you hadn't noticed, nothing much ever happens."

"I gotcha. We'll do what we can. Well, back to the cards."

"You guys take care."

"See ya, Billy."

The door closed and was bolted from the inside. Ten minutes later, still badly shaken by how close he had come both to killing and dying, Ben was safely back in his room.

At midnight a violent thunderstorm swept through the Oasis, and then vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

At three, still far too wired to sleep, he was standing by the window when suddenly, out in the desert well beyond the fence, the blue lights of a runway lit up the vastness, stretching as far as he could see. A few minutes later, accompanied by a roar that shook Building 2, a huge jet, possibly a 727, landed smoothly, taxied to the far end of the runway, and stopped.

Stepanski's uniform had been taken in by a greedy tailor in Fadiman. Now Ben removed it from the closet and brushed some lint from the lapel.

The alligator was in his net.

Dom Angelo.

With only those two words to go by, Natalie commenced a desperate search through every phone book she could find. Nothing. She spoke with the desk clerk at her hotel, who questioned whether or not she might have misheard, and the woman actually said Don Angelo.

"Would that make any difference?" she asked, instantly buying into the possibility.

"No," said the man.

His Portuguese-English dictionary said that dom meant gift, or gifted one, and was also a title, specifically, lord.

Now, uncertain over what the anxious nurse in the floral print dress might actually have said, Natalie trudged up to her room, totally spent from the long day, the hills of Rio, the heat, and probably some lingering jet lag. She felt as isolated and alone as she could ever remember. She was an athlete with a single, damaged lung that there was little chance of ever getting replaced. Don or Dom Angelo, even if she ever did find him, wasn't going to change that reality.

There was no need for Brazilian whiskey to help her sleep this night, or in fact, for anything other than the white noise of the air conditioner.

Tomorrow she would make two stops at Santa Teresa's — the first to vice president Gloria Duarte's office, and the second to the surgical ICU. If she was unsuccessful, it would be back to the police.

Don Angelo…Dom Angelo…

As she drifted off, the names generated an unending Mobius loop of questions. Was one of them a title of some sort? A first name? Why had the woman not even tried to explain? Did it seem that obvious to her that Natalie would understand?

One thing that their brief encounter had made clear to her: There was more to the assault in the alley and the subsequent loss of her lung than she had believed.

With time, the drone of the air conditioner rocked her into an uneasy sleep, but twice during the night, her exhaustion lost out to the familiar, vivid reenactment of her attack. As was the case so many times before, the horror was more intense than mere memory, and in many ways more real and detailed than any nightmare. After the second episode, she was too shaken to fall back to sleep. She was deceived by the cabbie at the airport, she was shot, she was operated on, her lung was removed, she was well cared for, and she was flown home as soon as her identity was established. All of that was completely and absolutely true…and yet, it wasn't.

At some point, Natalie reconnected with sleep. It was nearly eleven when she awoke. By the time she had showered, dressed, and made it back to the hospital, it was just past noon. Duarte was at a meeting, she was told, and would not be back in the hospital until the following morning. On a lark, she asked the woman's secretary if either Don or Dom Angelo meant anything to her. The woman smiled politely and suggested that her boss, who knew almost everything, would be the one to ask.

Certain that the way things were going, the nurse she sought would be out of the hospital, too, Natalie made her way up to the second-floor surgical intensive care unit — the SIC-U, it would have been called in most hospitals in the States. Following the removal of her lung in one of Santa Teresa's twenty-one operating rooms, she would have been taken there.

Please be here, Natalie begged as she stepped through the automatic glass doors. Please be here…

She scanned what she could see of the busy unit and felt her spirit begin to sink. The SIOU was state-of-the-art — ten high-tech, glassy-enclosed cubicles, arranged around a central core nursing-monitoring station. Slowly, nonchalantly, nodding and smiling at anyone who made eye contact, Natalie strolled around the circle. She shouldn't have come during lunchtime, she was thinking. She shouldn't have -

Wearing blue scrubs, writing in a red loose-leaf notebook, the woman she was seeking emerged from the last cubicle and headed away from her. Her bulk and her pronounced limp left no doubt that she was the one from the street. Her pulse racing, Natalie caught up with the woman at the nursing station. Her face was cherubic and quite pretty. She wore a thin gold necklace, but no other jewelry, and no wedding ring. Her ID read DORA CABRAL.

"Excuse me, Senhorita Cabral," Natalie said softly in Portuguese.

The woman, smiling, looked up at her. Instantly, her expression tightened. Her gaze darted nervously about. For Natalie, her reaction eliminated what little doubt remained.

"Yes?" Dora asked.

"I am sorry to come here like this, senhorita, but I am desperate," Natalie said, worried that her Portuguese might not be up to the task. "I believe that you are the person who spoke to me on the street yesterday afternoon. If you are, please help me know who Dom Angelo is. I have tried to learn who he is, but I have failed."

"Not who," Dora said in a harsh whisper. "Where. It is a village. It is -

The nurse stopped abruptly, scribbled something on the margin of a sheet of paper, pushed it an inch or so toward Natalie, rose clumsily, and lurched into the corridor toward the cubicle where she had been working.