Michael Palmer - Extreme Measures

Joe Silver, totally bewildered, stared at the man.

"What in hell is going on?" he managed.

"As soon as you called sul-cinylcholine an anesthetic, Eric," Darden went on, "I knew it was water.

Captain Wheeler is a criminal. Dr. Najarian meant only to frighten me.

This man tried to murder me, and confessed to murdering someone named Laura.

Sir, you are an animal."

Before anyone could react, Lester Wheeler drew his pistol and fired.

Darden grabbed at his left shoulder as he reeled backwards and dropped to the floor.

People screamed, falling over one another as they scrambled to find cover. Wheeler managed to get off another shot, this more wild, before the security guards were on him. Groaning loudly with every step, he dragged the three guards toward the main entrance like a fullback hauling tacklers toward a touchdown.

Two muscular young men raced from the crowd and helped wrestle him down.

Suddenly, it-from within the melee, Wheeler's gun sounded again.

Immediately the struggling stopped. The guards moved back. The policeman, on his knees, toppled over in slow motion and lay wide-eyed and motionless. Blood was rapidly soaking into his shirt from a dollar-sized hole in his chest.

"Call a code Ninety-nine!" Joe Silver screamed at the receptionists.

"Someone get to the E.R. and bring back two stretchers."

He raced over to where Haven Darden lay while the residents hurried to tend to Wheeler.

"The keys to these handcuffs," Eric said, scrambling to where the policeman lay. "They're in his shirt pocket." The residents were already stripping Wheeler's clothes away. The wound, Eric could see, was almost certainly mortal, even with immediate surgical help.

One of the guards retrieved the keys and freed Eric's hands. A stretcher arrived, and Wheeler's lifeless body was transferred to it and rushed to the E.R.

For a few frozen seconds Eric stood alone, trying desperately to sort out what had happened, what had been said. Laura and Scott both dead.

Was Wheeler telling the truth about that? And Dardeh-how could he not be Caduceus?

Numbly, he crossed to where Haven Darden lay.

Joe Silver had already ripped the man's shirt away, exposing a wound that entered and exited through his shoulder. Darden, though in obvious pain, remained completely conscious and surprisingly calm.

"You thought very quickly, Eric," he said. "I always admired that in you."

"I… I'm sorry I had to do what I did," Eric said.

"I was desperate."

"And do you now believe that I am not part of this Caduceus plot?"

"I don't know what to believe."

A stretcher arrived, and Eric and Joe Silver gently lifted the medical chief onto it.

"Perhaps," Darden said, "it would help if I told you that I know who your mysterious Anna Delacroix is. Dr. Silver, if you could, I'd like a minute alone with Eric."

Joe Silver looked about uncomfortably.

"Perhaps I'd better stay," he said. "I need to hear this too."

The battle to save the life of Lester Wheeler was shortlived. Eric stood by the doorway of the trauma room, watching the monitor and the furious efforts of the thoracic surgical team, and hoping against hope for the miracle that might save the one person who could tell him Laura's fate.

In a room just down the hall, Joe Silver was attending to the father of Rebecca Darden, known to Silver as Ariel Dumonde and to Eric as Anna Delacroix. Haven Darden would, in all likelihood, be Silver's last case at White Memorial. As soon as he was certain the medical chief was stable, Silver had promised Eric he would drive to the private psychiatric facility where Reed Marshall was being treated and offer Marshall what help he could. He would also strongly recommend that the hospital keep him on the emergency staff in some capacity.

Then, in the morning, he would submit his resignation to the hospital administrators, explaining to them how he had been seduced by a beautiful woman, and later blackmailed by her.into changing his vote on the search committee. He knew nothing of the reason he had been ready to delay the vote, but with his own career, marriage, and children at stake, he had made a choice he would now have to live with for the rest of his own life.

Eric felt his heart sink as the surgeon working on Wheeler shrugged, stepped back from the table, and flicked off the police captain's monitor. The lone spark of hope he had nurtured was gone.

At a loss for what he could possibly do next, Eric wandered down the hall to Haven Darden's room. The medical chief, alone save for a nurse, was sitting up on his stretcher, an IV draining into his wrist.

Heavy bandages swathed his wounded shoulder.

"Is he dead?" he asked.

"He is."

Darden motioned Eric inside, and then asked the nurse to leave.

"Rebecca was always too beautiful for her own good," he said.

"She is that, sir. I'm sorry for what you're going through."

"And I for what you are going through. Obviously, as far as my daughter is concerned, things are going to get much worse. She has a great deal to answer for."I hope she can shed some light on what's happened to Laura."

"I hope so too," Darden said. His voice was husky and distant.

"You know, my wife and I began worrying about Rebecca when she was still in grade school, when we found she was getting other children-boys mostly-to do things for her or give her things in exchange for kissing her or touching her or just being her friend. We… we brought her to Haiti with us any number of times in hopes of breaking through her narcissism, and insdmng in her some sort of social conscience. She seemed like a different person there-so interested in everything, so anxious to know the country. There was no way to know that she would just take what we were giving her and…

He began to weep. Eric took his hand and held it.

"You're a good man and a great doctor," he said.

"I don't know what to say except that you deserved better.

"Thank you. Is there any more you can tell me about what Rebecca was involved in? What those people were doing?"

"Not precisely. But when I amp; know, I promise you and I will sit and talk about it "

"I would be grateful. I'm very sorry about your friend. I hope Captain Wheeler was mistaken about her."

"I hope so, too, Dr. Darden, but I fear he wasn't Do you think Rebecca might be home now? I'd like to call her."

"She might She doesn't have a job, you see. Never seemed to need one. I should have asked her about the sports car and the furs and all the other things, but…"

"Please, sir, try to get some rest. You've lost a fair amount of blood."

Eric left the emergency room and headed through the crowded corridors to the Proctor Building and Dave Subarsky's lab. Remarkably, the hospital seemed perfectly normal, as if the violence he'd witnessed had never happened.

It was unlikely that Dave had heard anything at all from Laura, but there was always the chance. If there had been no word from her, at least his friend could help him decide whether it was better to call Rebecca Darden immediately or try to confront her at the Cambridge address Haven Darden had given him.

The research floor was largely deserted, and the door to Subarsky's lab locked. Eric found one researcher-a young biochqkist named Jessica Marshlocking up for the evening, "Excuse me," he asked, "have you seen David?"

"He left a while ago," the woman said.

"Do you have a key to his lab? Dave must have assumed I had mine', but I left them at home."

"I have keys to all the labs on the floor," she said.

"But I'm not allowed to-"

"Please, Jessica," Eric implored. "Dave was supposed to meet me here..

I'm sure he's left a — note for me inside. There's a call that might have come in on his phone that I've got to know about."