Michael Palmer - The fifth vial

"You'll never understand."

Try me.

"She's a Producer — the lowest of all social groups. Compare the value of her life to that of the great man she is about to save. Either she must die, or he must. It's as simple as that. And I say it is no contest. Organs must be allocated to save the lives of those who can and will best serve mankind."

"You left out the part about being able to pony up a gazillion dollars as well."

"Wrong! Many of the Guardians we save don't have that kind of money."

"Such charity. And here I was so surprised and proud of you when you put Tonya in her place and treated that poor fellow who couldn't stop smoking so humanely."

"If you hadn't been standing there I would have kissed Tonya for being so right on the mark. I wanted to kill that bastard Culver for wasting that heart. I wanted to kill him on the spot. I wanted to open his chest with a dull blade, remove that precious heart I had been forced by the system to place there, and put it into someone who deserved it more and would take better care of it."

Out of the corner of her eye, Natalie could see that Luis had reached his gun and was slowly maneuvering it to where he could pull it from beneath his leg. His color had, if possible, worsened, and his eyes looked nearly lifeless. Nearly.

"So, Douglas the Great," Natalie said, "the reason you didn't just have me killed and buried down here is? No, wait, don't bother answering, Lord Philosopher King. I know. I'm alive just in case, by some fluke, my lung is rejected or fails to function for whatever reason, you want me incubating the other one."

"How long is this poison going to last?" Berenger demanded. "I would say go fuck yourself, but I have high hopes of being elevated to the exalted ranks of Guardian once more, and I wouldn't want to say anything so crude that it hurts my chances."

Natalie could see that the corner of Berenger's eye had begun to twitch. Another hit. Turning his back on her, he ordered Santoro to his feet.

"Come on, Xavier, I need you in the OR."

Santoro tried to stand, slipped on the products of his own sickness, fell, and began to giggle and moan at the same time. At that moment, a helicopter swung low over the hospital, then off to the landing strip. One of the soldiers was dispatched to guide the latest arrivals in.

"Damn it, Santoro!" Berenger snapped. "Get up, get showered and dressed, and get ready to assist me in the OR!"

He grabbed the man by the back of the shirt and pulled him rudely to his feet. The cleansing shower would never happen. Luis raised his gun and, before either of the remaining two soldiers could react, fired from twenty feet away. The bullet caught Santoro squarely in the chest, knocking him back into an easy chair, an odd smile on his lips. A second shot, probably meant for Berenger, shattered a window.

"No!" Natalie screamed as the two soldiers riddled Luis with automatic fire from their machine guns, causing his body to jerk about like a marionette. "No!"

Natalie wanted to rush to him, but in truth, there was nothing she could do, and the Arab soldiers were extremely jittery. Instead, she moved off to one side and satisfied herself that her hero was at least at peace, as she, herself, would undoubtedly be before too much longer.

Berenger was clearly unraveling. He stormed over to where Vincent's girlfriend lay, violently snapping her head and kicking her feet at whatever hallucinations were harassing her.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

The woman glanced up at him and began laughing hysterically. Then, without warning, she threw up, spattering his shoes. Contemptuously, he wiped them on her pants leg, and then turned toward the patio entrance where three soldiers rushed in wheeling a stretcher on which lay a young, copper-skinned, mustachioed man, with a portable monitor defibrillator and oxygen mask in place. His breathing was labored. Behind him came an Arab physician in scrubs and a white coat, and a young, lean, black man pushing a small, glass-front case, mounted on wheels, and containing a number of units of blood.

"You'll be working in OR one as usual, Randall," Berenger said to the man. "The bypass pump is just as you left it. You know where everything else is. Be careful getting ready, but do it quickly."

He patted the pump tech on the shoulder, hurried over to the prince, and listened to his heart and lungs.

"I don't like this," he said to the physician in English. "I don't like this at all. Where are Khanduri and the nurses?"

"We flew over them. They're in two cars, about five miles from here — on that winding road, half an hour, maybe. No more than that."

"You should have put them all on the jet and flown straight in."

"You heard the pilot back in Rio. He said the flaps weren't working right, and it was too dangerous."

"Christ. When did the prince start to slip?"

"At the airport, just as we were transferring him to the helicopter."

"Okay, okay, we can still pull all this together. Can you assist me in the OR?"

"I dare not leave the prince, especially when he is in this condition."

"All right. Get him into the recovery room and see what you can do to stabilize him until Khanduri gets here. Wait, what's the minister's name?"

"Minister al-Thani."

"I'm going to ask him if he can assist me in the operating room."

"I don't think that would be proper, no matter what," the physician said. "He is — "

"I need help, damn it! I need another pair of hands, even if the person they're attached to doesn't know anything about — No, no, wait. Never mind. Just get the prince onto the monitor in the recovery room and get him stabilized. I'm going to get started and have the heart harvested and ready when Khanduri and the nurses arrive."

"But who will assist you?"

Berenger actually may have smiled.

"She will," he said, pointing at Natalie.

You're out of your mind!" Natalie cried out. "I'm not going into the operating room to assist you. Not now, not ever. I'd rather die."

Berenger, almost invariably composed, suave, and in control, was clearly rattled by the sudden downturn of his patient, the violent death of Xavier Santoro, and Natalie's constant sniping. She was pleased to see that the tick at the corner of his eye had, if anything, intensified.

"Actually, Natalie," he said, his teeth nearly clenched, "it's not going to be you who is doing the dying — at least not yet." He bent down and picked up Vargas's pistol. "It's going to be them." He gestured to the kitchen and maintenance crews. "If you aren't in clean OR scrubs, prepping your hands within two minutes, I will begin at the end of this row and will kill one of them every minute until you comply."

"But — "

"There's more. If you don't assist me, I will have to use Dorothy, my anesthesiologist. And before I do that, I will have her strap the patient down and allow her to wake up. Then we will harvest her heart."

"Jesus, Doug, what are you?"

"Right now I'm a man who needs to get things done in a hurry. Are you in?"

He casually aimed the gun at one of the chambermaids, a pretty Indian woman who couldn't have been more than sixteen.

"The Philosopher King," Natalie muttered as she turned and headed for the operating room.

Berenger followed her.

"There are scrubs for us in that cabinet," he said. "We can change in recovery room two. I won't peek if you don't." "Peek all you want."

"My second surgeon and the nurses should be here any minute. Then I shall have all the help I need, and you can return to the others knowing you have saved many of their lives."