Robin Cook - Seizure

Kurt’s attitude toward women had been set in stone by his ultimate betrayer, his mother. She and he had had an intimate relationship fostered by long absences of his undemonstrative strict disciplinarian father who had demanded perfection from both wife and son but who only acknowledged failure. His father had preceded Kurt into the Army’s Special Forces, and like Kurt, who had ultimately followed in his footsteps, he had been a trained covert-operations killer. But when Kurt was thirteen, his father had been killed in a classified operation in Cambodia during the final weeks of the Vietnam War. His mother’s reaction was like a lovebird released from a cage. Ignoring Kurt’s emotional confusion of grief and relief, she indulged a flurry of affairs, the intimacies of which Kurt had to endure audibly through the thin drywall of their army-base house. Within months, Kurt’s mother consummated her frantic dating by marrying a prissy insurance salesman whom Kurt despised. Kurt felt that all women, particularly the attractive ones, were like the mythologized mother of his youth, plotting to lure him in by seduction, sap him of his strength, and then abandon him.

As soon as Daniel and Stephanie had disappeared inside building number three, Kurt’s eyes moved automatically to monitor twelve and waited for them to appear in the cafeteria. When they joined the line at the steam table, Kurt got to his feet and walked out into his office. From the back of his desk chair, he took his lightweight, black silk jacket and slipped it on over his black T-shirt. He wore the jacket to conceal the holstered pistol he always carried in the small of his back. He pushed the sleeves up above his elbows. From the corner of his desk, he picked up the box containing the tiny cell phone bug he’d been eager to implant in Stephanie’s phone as well as its monitoring device. He also grabbed his jeweler’s tool kit, which included a delicate soldering iron and a binocular watchmaker’s loupe.

Moving catlike, he emerged from a basement door in building two with the equipment and tools in hand and headed for building one. Within minutes, he was at the lab bench assigned to Daniel and Stephanie. After a quick glance in all directions to be certain he was alone in the laboratory, he retrieved the phone, put on the loupe, and set to work.

In less than five minutes, the bug was in place and tested. Kurt was in the process of replacing the phone’s plastic cover when he heard the distant door to the lab bang open. Expecting to see one of the lab personnel or possibly Paul Saunders, he bent over and looked beneath the reagent shelf back toward the entrance some eighty feet away. To his utter surprise, it was Stephanie who’d arrived and was approaching with a quick, determined step.

For a brief, panic-filled second, Kurt debated what to do. But his training prevailed, and he quickly regained his customary composure. He finished with the phone by snapping its cover into place, then slipped it back to its original position behind the hydrochloric acid bottle. Then he lent his attention to the jeweler’s tools, the monitoring device, and the loupe. As silently as possible, he got them into a drawer and pushed it closed with his hip. Stephanie D’Agostino was now a mere twenty feet away and closing in rapidly. Backing away, Kurt intended to keep the lab bench and its overhead shelving between him and the researcher. It was not much cover, and she would surely see him, but there were no other options.

In truth, Tony was mostly pissed that he had to forsake a nice lunch, which was one of the high points of his day, while he made yet another visit to the freaking Castigliano brothers’ crummy plumbing supply store. The rotten-egg smell of the salt marsh didn’t help matters either, although with the temperature in the twenties, it was less of a problem than it had been on his last visit a week and a half earlier. At least it was easier visiting the stinkhole in the middle of the day rather than at night, since he didn’t have to worry about tripping over any of the crap littered around the front of the place. The good part was that he had reason to believe this would be the last visit, at least concerning the problem with CURE.

Tony went through the entrance door and headed for the rear office. Gaetano looked up from dealing with a couple customers at the front counter and nodded a greeting. Tony ignored him. If Gaetano had done his job right, Tony would not be walking at that moment between dusty plumbing-supply shelves, with the smell of rotten eggs lingering in his nose. Instead, he’d be sitting at his favorite table at his Blue Grotto restaurant on Hanover Street, sipping a glass of ’97 Chianti while trying to decide which pasta to have. When underlings screwed up, it irked him to death, since it never failed to mess up his life. As he’d grown older, he’d become a progressively firmer believer in the old saying, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”

Tony opened the door to the rear office, stepped in, and pulled the door shut with a bang. Lou and Sal were at their respective desks, eating pizza. A fleeting shiver of nausea went down Tony’s spine. He hated the smell of anchovies, especially combined with the residual aroma of rotten eggs.

“You people have a problem,” Tony announced, pressing his lips together in a wry expression of disgust and bobbing his head like one of the dog figures some folks put in the rear windows of their cars. But to ensure that he wasn’t implying any disrespect to the twins, he approached each of them for a quick, slapping handshake before retreating to the couch and plopping down. He unbuttoned his coat but left it on. He only intended to stay for a couple minutes. There was nothing complicated about what he had to say.

“What’s wrong?” Lou asked through a mouthful of pizza.

“Gaetano screwed up. Whatever the hell he did down in Nassau had no effect at all. Zero!”

“You’re joking.”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” Tony wrinkled his forehead and spread his hands widely.

“You’re telling us that the professor and your sister didn’t come back?”

“It’s more than that,” Tony said scornfully. “Not only didn’t they come back, Gaetano’s shenanigans, whatever they were, didn’t even warrant a single word from my sister to my mother, and they talk almost every day.”

“Wait a second!” Sal questioned. “You’re saying that your sister didn’t say they had a little problem or anything like her boyfriend got hurt? Anything at all?”

“Absolutely nothing! Zilch! All I hear is everything’s going honky-dory in paradise.”

“That doesn’t jibe with what Gaetano said,” Lou said, “which I find hard to believe, since he usually overdoes the physical stuff.”

“Well, in this instance, he surely didn’t overdo anything,” Tony said. “The lovebirds are still down there, frolicking in the sun and insisting, according to my mother, that they are going to stay the three weeks or month or whatever they’d originally planned. Meanwhile, my accountant says nothing’s changed with their company’s downward spiral. He insists in a month they will be broke, so goodbye to our two hundred K.”

Sal and Lou exchanged glances of disbelief, confusion, and escalating irritation.

“What did Gaetano say he did?” Tony asked. “Slap the professor’s wrists and tell him he was being bad? Or did he not even go to Nassau and say he did?” Tony crossed his arms and legs and sat back.

“Something’s screwy in all this!” Lou declared. “None of it adds up.” He put his slice of anchovy-and-Italian-sausage pizza down, ran his tongue around the inside of his lips to loosen the debris on his teeth, swallowed, and leaned forward to press a button protruding on the surface of his desk. A muffled buzz sounded through the door connecting the office to the store proper.