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She was ready to go. He could see it.
They understood each other perfectly, but words blurted out of him anyway. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “It’s not going to happen, kid. Game over.”
A tiny nod, a weak flutter of her fingers. An almost smile.
“You’re ruining everything! She was so close! So goddamn close!” the blond woman screeched, chasing him in. Alex Aaro followed close on her heels and grabbed her, pinning her against his massive chest.
The girl’s mother. Nick stared at her and repeated the words mechanically. “I’m sorry. It’s not going to happen.”
Aaro locked the flailing, sobbing woman behind his arm, and yelled over her. “Go on! I’ll secure this room.” The doctors were starting to slink towards the door. Aaro leveled his H&K at them. “Everybody stop right where you are,” he barked. “Sit down against the wall with your hands on your heads.Now.”
“Sorry,” Nick whispered again to the girl on the table, and then he grabbed the elbow of the woman who was nearest the door and hauled her along with him into the corridor. She screamed and struggled, but he shoved her on ahead of himself. “Where’s Mathes?” he asked.
“I’m just the perfusionist. I just run the bypass machine! I never hurt anybody! I swear it!” The woman had an Eastern European accent.
“Shut up and take me to Mathes,” he snarled.
She started babbling, in…Estonian? Yeah, it was Estonian. Hard to tell, she was talking so fast, voice garbled with tears. She was nattering about her boy, what Zhoglo had threatened to do to him if she didn’t comply. He had no time for this shit, no matter how pathetic.
Estonian wasn’t his best language, but he could threaten in it.
He slammed her up to the wall, pointed the gun at her leg. “Take me to Mathes,” he said, in her own language. “Or I start with the knee.”
She wailed and sobbed, but when he took his hand away, she set out at an unsteady, shambling run, with Seth and him right behind.
They didn’t have far to go. There was another operating theater, full of doctors. He veered towards it. The woman shook her head wildly, grabbed his arm and dragged him onward. “No, no. This is another recipient. All recipients. Mathes is not there, he is…he ishere.”
More double doors. Slap. Another operating theater. The woman stumbled to her knees and pointed to the glass doors. “There,” she sobbed. “He is there. Please, don’t hurt me.”
Nick left her and crashed through the door. Another table, another cluster of green masked ghosts, bending down over a table flooded with light. The light gleamed off a scalpel, and oh sweet bleeding Christ, one of them held a surgical saw—
“Get the fuck away from that table!” he yelled.
A clatter of equipment, shouts and shrieks, as the doctors leaped back from the table. Nick advanced, holding the gun on them.
Sveti. Unconscious, her thin white chest bared to the knife under the bright lights. Every rib showing. The guy standing over her with the scalpel had not moved. He stared at Nick, his eyes wide in disbelief.
“I said to getback, asshole!” he snarled.
The room was silent, but for the blip and whirr of machines, and the steady beep of Sveti’s heart on the monitor. Still beating. Still inside her. Seth came up behind him, cool and grim.
“Which of you pieces of shit is Richard Mathes?” he asked.
The others shrank away from the table, leaving the one who held the scalpel standing all alone. The one who had not scurried at his first two warnings. The one who had held his ground.
The arrogant prick yanked his mask away, cursing. His handsome face was full of righteous indignation. “Who the hell are you? And how dare you burst in on us in this way? We are performing an extremely delicate life-saving surgery, and you have just—”
“Shut up, you lying butcher,” Nick said. “I know exactly what you’re doing. Step back. Right now. Or I will blow your head off.”
Light flashed on the scalpel as Mathes’s hands went slowly up, his mouth twisting in impotent rage. The urge to jump on the guy and kill him with his bare hands almost overwhelmed Nick.
He blinked back angry tears. Sveti’s face was so white, so hollow. There was a fresh bruise under one eye, an old greenish-yellow one under the other. What had they done to her?
“Which of you dirtbags is the anesthesiologist?” he demanded.
The shrinking, not-me demeanor of the others singled out by elimination a pudgy woman with close-set eyes. He pointed. “You?”
She shrugged. Her eyes were sullen and dead above her mask.
