that Sam saw only struggling bodies. They were a foot from the roof edge. Sam could not risk a shot into the knotted bodies.
Sam saw the remaining gunman jump over and behind a planter box. Without waiting Sam charged the planter and dived, certain the man was popping a clip. Sam hit the middle of the man’s body and took out his eyes with finger jabs. Another strike to the head and the man was finished.
Sam turned to Shohei and saw him head-butting and kicking, throwing his own blood everywhere as he struck. The bullet had ripped a lot of flesh. Sam looked at his eyes, certain that the color of life was fading.
The Frenchmen were pushing him to the edge. Not one of them seemed fearful of dying so long as they got Shohei.
Having no choice, Sam threw his knife into the bodies, hoping he wouldn’t kill his friend. The dull silver of the razor-sharp blade sank deep in the leader’s back. There was a pause as they teetered on the edge; a quiet wind was nature’s sigh before receiving her own. They fell.
Sam stepped to the edge.
His breath caught in his throat. Ten feet below, dangling on a harness suspended by two cables, an aluminum window washer’s platform shone gray and pitted under the dull November sky. All three men lay on the platform. The two had their hands on Shohei’s chest and chin, trying to shove him into space. Sam jumped. From behind him Anna screamed.
The platform shook and swayed with the impact of Sam’s landing. One swift kick and a fist strike and Sam had the two men unconscious. In seconds the leader would be gone forever. There was no key to operate the electric motors that would raise the platform. Reaching down, he found a hole in Shohei’s shoulder and compressed it with his fist. Then a second hole closer to the chest. Shohei coughed. Death was near. His face was ashen. Sam had to move him to the roof.
Then he saw it. Running down the first twenty feet of the building was a row of steel protrusions held fast in the concrete. The entire logic of a twenty-foot ladder on a fifty-nine-story building escaped him, but the fact of it filled him with hope. His soul was now slightly less bleak than the sky. Putting Shohei in a fireman’s carry, he climbed. Anna’s worried eyes peered down.
“Shohei, you look a little bruised there,” Sam said as he laid his friend on the rooftop.
“Never mind,” Shohei whispered.
“It was a great show until somebody brought a gun. You know I’m gonna be really screwed up if you die on me. Damn you.”
“You should take Anna to see the cherry blossoms of Hokkaido,” Shohei whispered.
“Please don’t die on me.” Sam heard his own voice crack.
Sam did what he could to stop the bleeding while Anna used his cell phone. He told her who to call. A helicopter ambulance arrived five minutes later to lift out a nearly dead Shohei.
“I’m going with him,” Anna said.
“They won’t let you.”
“They will.”
“We can’t protect you as well if you do that.”
“I don’t care. I’m going. Do plan B.”
“I have to go get Weissman-we don’t have time to argue.”
“Good, you can save your breath. Good-bye.”
The jet turbines began to whine.
Sam watched her scream at the pilots, gesturing her determination. He couldn’t imagine what she would say to get them to bend an unbendable rule, but he wasn’t surprised when she climbed in.
The Frenchmen had by now all slunk away, or died, or carried one another off. He didn’t care. The only bad guys who’d succeeded in doing any real damage were corpses. There was apparently a second player after the CD who cared not a whit for the French or anyone else.
Anna Wade watched as the medics worked on Shohei.
“Take care of Sam,” he choked.
They ran IVs and got blood started.
“Oh, God,” one of them muttered, trying to stop the bleeding with a plastic bandage.
They injected medicine, got him an airway, a respirator, blood, oxygen, and stuck electrodes to the part of his chest that wasn’t raw meat. Anna saw Shohei watching her from the corner of his eye. His fingers moved like fish fins in calm water and knowing what he wanted, she took his left hand and tried to send her love. But she doubted that he was conscious for more than seconds.
“No,” Anna said mostly to herself. “Please don’t die.”
The monitor that was calling out his heartbeat went flat. The medics grabbed electric paddles. As the life went out of his body they jolted it with current. Again and again they tried.
Shohei never came back.
John Weissman looked to be sleeping at the desk, but Sam feared the worst. He launched a flying kick at the door and broke the lock. In seconds, a small crowd gathered in the hallway.
He found no pulse in Weissman’s neck. Lifting him out of the chair, Sam laid him on the floor. Weissman’s lips were blue, his pupils dilated; he had a dead man’s pallor. Sam began compressing his chest. An officeworker knelt next to him, accepting a small part in the grotesque theater unfolding before them.
“Breathe into his lungs. Two breaths for five beats,” Sam said.
Another man came to the door.
“Call an air ambulance,” Sam said. “You must go through the government to land on this roof.” He gave the man the number. “Tell them what’s happening. Tell them it’s for Sam.”
This time it was eighteen minutes before the med techs were down from the roof with a gurney. They took over, but Sam knew it was hopeless. He didn’t want to think about the meaning of it all: Weissman’s wife; his kids; the grandkids, the family dinners; holidays. The shared joys were now gone because Sam had decided to stick him in a room instead of taking him to the roof.
The police had arrived and were clearing the area. Sam threw open the drawers, looking for the CD and knowing it was fruitless. His only hope was that the material had been transmitted to Harvard in time.
He walked to reception, passed a uniformed cop, but May was nowhere to be seen. Obviously the detectives hadn’t arrived yet. With his cell phone he dialed John Quarries, an assistant director of the FBI in Washington, DC. It took him three minutes to explain that he had stepped into a nest of bad people and was going to need somebody big to vouch for him. Some minutes later he had Quarrles’s assurance that the New York office of the FBI would tell local law enforcement what it needed to know about Sam’s and Anna Wade’s involvement in the deaths.
Twenty
Jeremiah Fuller sat in his living room with his eldest daughter, her husband, Marmy, and his two grandchildren. Stacy made a pitcher of iced tea while he checked the steak on the grill and came back inside.
“Okay, Dad,” his daughter said, “it’s clear that your disease has taken a turn for the better. Can you give us a clue what they did to force the remission?”
“Who cares what they did?”
“Well, do you even know?”
“Actually I don’t. It’s part of the program. They don’t tell you exactly what they are doing. That’s why they do it in the far corners of the earth.”
“That seems unethical to me.”
“But look at the results. I need the pills in my dresser drawer or I get awfully jumpy, but that’s the only downside.”
“I just can’t believe it. Before this you could barely remember that you went to the store for milk. Now you can memorize a dozen digits. More than any of us.”
