Within three hours of receiving Laura's call at his home in Laurel, Virginia, the head of Communigistics International had the government-owned jet on the ground at Boston's Logan Airport. By 7:30 A.M. the Lear was airborne once again, streaking west. Sharing the cabin with Neil Harten were an associate of his from Plan B named Thorsen, plus Eric, Laura, and Maggie Nelson.
Twenty-five hundred miles away, they knew, Bernard Nelson lay unconscious, hooked to a ventilator in the intensive care unit of the hospital in Utah. And from what Eric had learned from his conversation with the attending physician, the detective's condition was not good.
Their odyssey had begun with an early-morning phone call to Maggie Nelson from a man named Smith in Moab. From what she could tell, her husband had succeeded in finding and penetrating the facility at Charity, Utah, only to be poisoned by the head of the operation there, a physician named Barber. Details of Nelson's subsequent rescue by a Charity employee named Pike were sketchy, but apparently Barber had been shot and wounded in the process, and another employee killed.
Although he was conscious when the ambulance arrived at the town, during the ride to Moab, Bernard had slipped into a coma.
Maggie Nelson's first move had been to call Laura at Bernard's Boston apartment.Now, the travelers stared down in awed silence at the fantastic scene below. The town, barely a smudge on the massive landscape, was surrounded by police cruisers and ambulances. Dozens of people were milling about along the single main street. Others lay on stretchers outside a low cinder-block building.
The pilot made two wide swings overhead, giving those on each side of the aircraft a good look. Then he banked to the east and shot across the rugged desert toward Moab. Seated next to Gil Harten at the rear of the plane, Eric briefed him on what he knew of the poison tetrodotoxin.
With the intervention of Haven Darden, the hospital administration had allowed Eric to search the offices of Dave Subarsky and Norma Cullinet.
In a locked box in the nurse's desk, he found a number of ampules of intravenous adrenaline. He also retrieved two of what appeared to be baby-food jars, each about half-filled with a coarse grayish powder. One had a small stick-on label reading simply 'T.'; and the other, D.
When confronted with the find, and a brief explanation of his daughter's role in the Charity Project, Haven Darden picked up the phone and asked Eric to wait in the corridor outside his hospital room.
After just a few minutes, he called him back inside.
'My daughter says that the powder labeled 'T' is what we suspected,' he said. There was great sadness in his eyes, but also undisguised relief in his voice that Rebecca had agreed to cooperate.
'The other is some sort of substance to reverse the effects of the toxin. Rebecca says that the dose of the antidote is between two and five grams, and that her cohorts had been dissolving it in saline and administering it intravenously. They also used large doses of adrenaline, but she has no idea of the amount. Most of the work was done in the monitoring room at the mortuary.
Later this morning, she has agreed to go with my wife and our attorney to the police.'
'I'm sorry you and your wife have to go through this, sir,' Eric said.
Darden shrugged.
'Who knows how much of a child's behavior is the fault of the parents?' he said. 'Perhaps in the long run some good will come of all this for her and for us.'
The antidote dissolved readily in sterile saline.
Working on his tray table in the plane, Eric used a small scale to measure out the dose Haven Darden had suggested, and then carefully drew it up into a large syringe.
'An IV injection of an unknown unsterile powder is not my idea of fun,' he said, 'but I can always treat any infection that results.'
'What's your sense of the doc in Wab?' Harten asked.
'He seemed okay, but he wasn't too excited about administering the dose of adrenaline I've settled on.'
Together, Eric and Den had maewed Reed Marshall's resuscitation efforts on Loretta Leone, and had deten- nined that his aggressive approach and repeated use of the drug had almost certainly begun reversing her toxicity and increasing the speed and force of her cardiac contractions even while she was awaiting autopsy.
'Belts on, tray tables up, everyone,' the pilot broadcast. 'We're landing.'
'Are you going back up front with Laura?' Harten asked.
Eric shook his head. Throughout the early portion of their flight, Harten had sat with her, candidly answering questions and sharing information about her brother's life of dangerous service.
Over the hours that followed, Eric had seen the reality of Scott's death take hold.
'She needs a little time by herself,' he said.
'Is she going to stay in Boston?'
'I hope so.'
A soft squeak of the Lear's main gear signaled the perfect landing in Moab. A police cruiser and two cars raced out to bring the passengers to the hospital.
Hand in hand with Laura and Maggie Nelson, Eric hurried up the walk and straight to the I.C.U.
The local internist had done a remarkable job of holding Bernard together. Although the detective was still unconscious, his blood pressure had begun responding to the massive adrenaline doses the man had given, and his kidneys had already started working.
Neil Harten and the others waited in the family room as Eric huddled with the internist. While they were administering the tetrodotoxin antidote and another dose of adrenaline, a stretcher bearing another patient was wheeled into the I.C.U.
Eric moved to help evaluate the new arrival, and found himself staring down at the man who had once been his boss. Craig 'Abrrell, drawn and filthy stared blankly up at him with rheumy, jaundiced eyes.
'His temps one-oh-four,' the ambulance attendant offered.
'Looks like fulminant hepatitis,' Eric said to the internist.
'This man's a doctor from White Memorial in Boston. He was part of that Caduceus group I told you about-at least he was before he got into trouble at the hospital. I guess this is part of the Caduceus early-retirement plan.'
'He looks bad.'
'Maybe that DS-Nineteen wasn't working as well as Subarsky said it was.
You want to work on him?'
Eric asked.
'Not really, but I will.'
'I'll stay with Nelson.'
In just half an hour Bernard Nelson began to show signs of responding to the treatment. Harten and his associate headed off to investigate Charity firsthand, while Laura and Maggie Nelson took up a vigil at Bernard's bedside.
Two hours passed, during which several cardiac crises arose.
Laura clutched Maggie's hand tightly as they watched Eric move from one side of the bed to 'the other, checking Bernard's physical condition, evaluating lab reports and the monitor pattern, and then calmly issuing instructions to the nurse. And she knew that regardless of what lay ahead for the two of them, she would never lose the admiration she was feeling for him at that moment Over the next hour, Bernard's condition seemed to stabilize. The need for Eric's intervention grew less frequent. Laura could see the deep lines of tension across his forehead begin to recede. Finally, four hours after their arrival, Bernard's eyes fluttered open.
Minutes later, he reached up and pointed to the endotracheal tube, imploring Eric to remove it.
'Has he made it?' Maggie Nelson asked.
Eric took both her hands and helped her up. Then he hugged her.
'You married one tough guy, Mrs. Nelson,' he said. 'He's a real bear.'
'I know,' she said.
He stepped back while she bent over, spoke a few words to her husband, and gently kissed him on the cheek. Then he sent the two women out of the room and motioned the nurse in. Laura watched from a distance as Eric whispered in the detective's ear, then quickly pulled out the polyethylene breathing tube.
Bernard sputtered and gagged as the nurse suctioned out his mouth and pharynx.
