George Chesbro - Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

My feelings about Bailey Kramer ranged from sorrow and guilt at the thought that I might have been responsible for his abduction and death at the hands of kidnappers, to outrage before the possibility that he might have decided the job was too much for him-or he had second thoughts about becoming involved, or he had wanted to get even with me-and had simply walked away from it all without telling me. Yet the cool temperature-an even 55 degrees-in his apartment kept bothering me; it was highly unlikely that any kidnappers intending to kill him would have allowed Bailey to turn down the thermostat so that he could save on fuel bills. It didn't make any sense.

It wasn't until early morning on the last day, 6:30 a.m. on December 24, as I stared at the dark ceiling above my bed, that a third possibility of what might have happened to him-or, more precisely, where he might have gone-occurred to me. I sat bolt upright in bed, and then, feeling like a fool for not considering this possibility before, I leaped out of bed, quickly pulled on jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and sneakers. I ran out of the apartment, grabbing my parka on the way out, bounded down the stairs past an astonished Veil and another guard, who were conferring on the second-floor landing, to the front door and out to the street. There was no time for talk or explanations.

The early-morning traffic on Christmas Eve was light, and I knew that cabs at this hour would be scarce; I didn't feel like waiting around for one. Bursting with energy fueled by crazy, desperate renewed hope, I sprinted the several blocks to Frank Lemengello's lab. I arrived at the brick-and-glass one-story building on the corner of 62nd Street thoroughly winded, and I doubled up at the curb, gasping for air until I had caught my breath. As when I had checked before, there were no lights on in the locked building-but that didn't necessarily mean he wasn't there; he could be asleep, or had taken precautions to make sure he didn't announce his presence to police or other passersby with lights on in a laboratory whose sole proprietor was away on vacation.

I tried the front door, as I had done before, and found it still securely locked with what I assumed was a double, or even triple, dead bolt. Before I went to work on that, I thought I would take a little tour of the perimeter to look for signs of life. I went back down the steps, stepped off the sidewalk to the lawn, and slowly walked on the grass along the north side of the building, looking at all the windows. They were dark. I reached the gravel service driveway at the rear, slowly walked down it, again inspecting each window; all I could see was darkness inside, and the pale, ghostly reflection of the rising winter sun. And then, in the window next to the delivery entrance at the back, I saw what I had hoped to find, something nobody would have seen unless they were looking very closely.

At the very corner of the window, escaping through a sliver of the alarm-rigged plate glass where the blanket covering the window had slipped loose, was a pencil line of light.

I bounded up the three steps to the delivery door, used both fists to pound on the steel plate. "Bailey, open up! It's me! Bailey, open the fucking door!"

After about thirty seconds of more pounding and shouting, the door abruptly swung open, and Bailey Kramer, wearing a surgical cap and mask along with safety goggles and latex gloves, stood in the doorway looking down at me. The flesh of his face that I could see was a study in black on black, with inky, swollen bulges under his soulful eyes, whose whites were streaked with blood-red crimson. I wondered when he had last slept.

"Put these on and follow me," he said brusquely, handing me a paper cap and mask, latex gloves, and safety goggles. "And don't get in my way."

I followed him, my heart pounding with excitement and hope, into a large storage and testing room at the back of the building that had been transformed into something that looked like a hybrid of my high school chemistry lab, Dr. Frankenstein's basement, and a moonshiner's still. All of the sophisticated electronic equipment on three long, worn marble-topped worktables had been pushed back and draped, the machines apparently having done their job. The exposed surface of two of the tables was covered with a tangle of Pyrex retorts and beakers of various sizes, all connected to one another by lengths of clear plastic tubing; inside the containers, liquids of different colors and viscosity merrily bubbled away over Bunsen burners. There was a strange, pungent smell in the air that reminded me of a cross between a bakery and a sewage disposal plant. The end result of all this double bubble toil and trouble was something oozing out of a tube connected to a condensation apparatus at the end of one of the tables; viscous pale green gunk was dripping in clots out of the tube onto a ceramic plate, where it almost immediately congealed into a thick paste that had the look and consistency of used bubble gum.

The third stone-topped table, stretching across the front of the room at a right angle to the others, was being used for what appeared to be a mixing operation. There were a number of different drugs or chemicals in shallow plastic bins separated from one another by partitions of plastic stripping. There was an array of tiny measuring spoons and spatulas, and three finely calibrated electronic scales with digital readouts. At the far end of the table was a small mound of powder that was the same color as the compound inside the capsules. This mound had been further separated into several even smaller mounds of uniform size that were arrayed over a sheet of brown butcher's paper.

Meds for Margaret and the lost flock.

One corner of the room had been transformed into a kind of cockroach heaven, a pile of empty pizza boxes, soup cans, paper and plastic takeout food containers, McDonald's and Burger King wrappers, and various other sorts of litter. In the middle of the floor was a folding cot with two army blankets and a pillow without a pillowcase, but it didn't look like it had been used much.

"Bailey, you've done it?!"

The chemist grunted and nodded his head. His back was to me as he stood before an autoclave, impatiently drumming his fingers on the side of a ceramic tray containing a mound of the pale green paste. The red warning light on the autoclave was glowing, and I could see from the dial on the front that the autoclave had been set at its lowest temperature; something was cooking inside. "I'm missing one small chain of the molecule, but I don't think it will make a noticeable difference. This stuff should do the trick."

I donned my cap, mask, gloves, and goggles. "How can I help?"

"It will be easier for me to show you than try to explain. I'll have a new batch of the key ingredient coming out of the oven in a minute or two. It has to be mixed with the other drugs in a very precise ratio to produce the compound we need. Find paper and a pencil somewhere. I'll give you the precise weights we need of each ingredient as we go along the mixing table together. Those are the final dosages there at the end."

I went to the front of the building, into Frank's office, and rummaged around in his desk until I found a pad and a ballpoint pen. Then I hurried back to the chemist's aromatic chapel of miracles. He was still waiting in front of the autoclave.

"For Christ's sake, Bailey. I thought you were dead."

"Why?" he asked in an absent tone. Bailey Kramer was obviously not a man easily distracted from his work.

"Why?! Because you didn't call, is why. What the hell was I supposed to think? I was worried about you."

Now he turned to look at me, and from what I could see of his face he looked genuinely puzzled. "I told you I'd let you know if I couldn't do it. A few days ago I finally cracked the problem, found out I could do it. So I went to work. I've been very busy since our conversation, because I knew there wasn't any time to waste. You said you needed it by Christmas Eve, and that's still a few hours away. We're going to make it."