now it’s done its job, so might as well get it out of there before anyone else gets hurt.”
“What is it, Howard?” Richard asked.
“Cobalt, Richard. Radioactive material. Prolonged exposure is lethal for humans. It’s in an open lead box I made myself. Put the lid back on, and there should be no leakage.”
“Cobalt. Where did you get cobalt in New York?” Silver demanded.
Howard chuckled. “Don’t be silly. You can’t get cobalt in New York.” He coughed twice. “I had to go to Jersey for that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a hospital in New Jersey that I read about closing down a year ago. Then I saw a few months back that they were auctioning off the equipment and furniture, so I went during the preview days and look around. I got to talking to one of the security guards from the auction company and asked him about the machines in the basement — big machines. Linear accelerators. CT scanners. An MRI. And some other goodies. He said that they would be sold off separately, but that some of the systems required special handling because they had radioactive material in them. Which was music to my ears.”
“Music? Why?”
“I’d been trying to figure out how to kill the final victim — the head of one of the big banks that created the crisis and profited. I couldn’t imagine any sort of death that was bad enough. Then, coincidentally, at my last exam, the doctor told me what my final weeks and days would be like, and a light went on. I knew whose death to use as the model for his.” Howard shifted his gaze to Silver. “Mine.”
“What did you do, Howard?”
“Theodore Dendt, the chairman and CEO of Grisham Caldren, spent last night sleeping the untroubled sleep of the all-powerful on his sumptuous, custom-made, king-size bed, which exposed him to enough radiation so that he’ll be dead within three days, tops. There’s nothing he can do to stop it. No cure. Money won’t help. Nothing anyone can do will slow it. He’s already as dead as if I’d blown his head off. Only now, like me, he has to get up each remaining day and spend every second thinking about how little time he has left. How his life has been terminated by someone he’s never met, for no other reason than because he was accessible. A target of convenience, you might say. Kind of a ‘shit happens’ thing, just like shit happened to me. It seemed fitting.”
Both Richard and Silver stared at him in horror.
Richard leapt up and pounded on the door. A second later it opened, and he disappeared, clutching Silver’s note as a guard entered the cell in his place.
Howard yawned. “How’s the head?”
“How do you think?” She slipped her pen into her jacket pocket. “You’re…you’re acting like you’re a monster. But you’re completely logical and aware of what you’re doing. I don’t understand it. How can a decent man do such things?” she asked, as much to herself as to him.
“Silver, Silver. I’m not a monster. That’s the worst part about this. I’m not insane — at least, not in the textbook way. I don’t hear voices. I don’t believe I’m pursuing God’s hidden plan. I’m not delusional. I’m simply a man without much time to live, who identified a way he could spend the remainder of his life doing some good.”
“Doing
“Yes. I’ve rid the world of seven parasites who brought with them misery and sadness and suffering. Their actions, and the actions of their like-minded colleagues, have ensured that the quality of life for countless people who never did anything wrong will be diminished. I simply did what the government and the law refuse to do. I brought accountability into the equation.”
Richard returned, dismissed the guard, and resumed his position at her side.
Silver glanced at the mirror along the far wall and exhaled with frustration and fatigue.
She looked at Richard. “Do we have enough?”
“I’d say so.”
She turned back to Howard. “What are you going to do now? You keep saying you had a reason for doing all this that goes beyond revenge. What’s the grand plan, Howard?”
“I’m writing a book. I’ll have to write fast, I know. But I figure that the memoirs of The Regulator will be interesting reading to a public with a short attention span, and I can document what was done and name the names of those even more deeply responsible than the few I exterminated — then perhaps there will be sufficient awareness so more action takes place. At the very least, it will be impossible for the system to pretend it doesn’t know what was done, or by whom. That’s my final gift. My legacy.”
“Then this was all a publicity stunt for the book?”
“I suppose if you were cynical you could say so. I prefer to say this was a way of ensuring people were interested in receiving a message they need to hear.”
The interrogation lasted another fifteen minutes. After it had concluded, Howard was taken away, leaving Silver and Richard alone.
“You hungry?” he asked her.
“Not really. I think I lost my appetite for the rest of my life.”
“Want to watch me eat? I’m sloppy, and I make noise.”
“You do know how to lure the ladies in.”
“I hear my belching is irresistible.”
“Then lead the way.”
“They sent a team to the penthouse. We both know what they’ll find,” Richard said as he scanned the menu of a little Italian place two blocks from headquarters.
“Can you imagine what it would be like to find out you’re going to die in another two or three days? In agony?”
“I’d say that’s what Howard is looking forward to, only in another few months. I don’t know which is worse.”
“He’s so calm. Do you think he’s a sociopath?” Silver asked.
“You know, I really don’t. He shows regret and obviously cared about others. He even seems to care how you’re doing. It could all be an act, but I don’t think so. I think Howard is something different. I’m not sure there’s a word for it. He’s a man who’s simply seen too much.”
“That’s what creeps me out. He’s so normal. And he makes it sound so rational.”
Richard didn’t say anything. The waiter came, and he ordered cannelloni. She opted for a salad.
“It’s a hard one, Silver. I have to say I’m glad I’m not going to be on the jury.”
“We both know he’ll never live long enough for this to go to a jury.”
“It’s really the perfect crime.”
“You sound like you…like you understand him.”
“I sort of do,” Richard admitted.
“But you can’t condone what he’s done. It’s wrong. You can’t just kill everyone you think has been bad. That’s what the law is for. The system.”
“Yes. I know. But he does raise an interesting question. What do you do when the system is broken?”
“Obviously, you need to work within the system to change it.”
“Sure. But if your research has shown that change is impossible? That the bad guys are just going to get away with it because the system itself is so flawed meaningful change is impossible?”
“I don’t know, Richard.”
“If someone broke into your house and raped Kennedy, and then you discovered that it was the mayor’s son, and because it was him, that he’d never be prosecuted…what would you do? No, even better, if you discovered that he did it all the time and had never been stopped and never would be?”
“I don’t like that kind of question.”
“I know. But that’s the question he’s forcing us to consider. It’s very much like that. We know who committed the crime, we know they’ve done it before, we know they’ll do it again, and we know nobody is ever going to stop them. So what’s your responsibility in that case?”
Their food came, and they ate in silence.
After a while Silver said, “I suddenly don’t like the world I’m living in.”
