Call It In

"Leo," I said. "Call the ambulance."

I did not raise my voice. I have thought about that, since. A man who had been trained in the schoolroom of crisis, as I was, might be expected to shout. But I said it in the voice in which one asks for the salt, and I said it to the mirror, which is not a mirror, with my eyes on the boy across the table.

"Now, please. And ask Special Agent Lang to come in."

Arlo Wren blinked.

"Atticus," he said. "There's no need—"

"There is every need."

"I'd rather finish. It would only take—"

"I know what it would take." I stood. I did not hurry. I walked round the table and pulled out the second chair and set it at his elbow, close, and sat down in it, so that our knees nearly touched, and I laid my hand flat on the steel beside his own. "You will give your statement, Arlo. Every word of it. I give you my word that you will. But you will not give it tonight, in this room, with your liver failing. You will give it in a bed, with a drip in your arm and a doctor at the door, and you will give it tomorrow, and the day after, and as long as it takes."

"I may not have—"

"You will have time."

"You can't know that."

"No," I said. "I cannot. But I would like very much to find out."

…

The door opened.

It opened with a violence that made the plastic bag skid on the table. Leo Maddox came through it at a lumber, red in the face, with his radio in his hand and the dead cigar jammed in his teeth. Behind him came Briona Lang, tall and gray, in a suit that had not been changed in twenty hours. Behind her, a thin young medic with a bag.

"What's happened?" said Leo.

"He has taken a poison."

I said it clearly and quite slowly, so that all of them could hear. "Yesterday morning at four, before he switched on the stream. It is a hepatotoxin. It acts for about a day and a half. He is nineteen hours and twenty-one minutes into it." I looked up at Briona. "The sclera are jaundiced. The right-upper-quadrant pain began at nine. There is a dry cough, and tremor, and cyanosis of the nailbeds, and I believe the liver has begun to fail. I need an ambulance, and I need a physician, and I need them to be told the exact name of the compound, as soon as it can be had."

"The name?" said Leo.

"There is a vial. On a folding table in the northeast corner of the cellar." I turned to Briona. "Ryder Okafor photographed it at my request, before the Bureau sealed the room. There are eleven pictures on my telephone. The lot number is legible. It is the same number, I believe, as a crate of ampoules recovered at St. Aurelian's, and a notebook in a black cover, which was logged and sealed in the evidence room at Eighth Street on the day of the raid. It is in a code. But it is a code that Mr. Okafor has been looking at for eleven weeks."

Briona's face did not change. But her eyes did.

"You think the notebook has the formula."

"I think it has what the formula was for. The preparation. The intended action. The dose. And I think that a man who writes so carefully has written down the antidote."

Arlo said, quietly, from the chair beside me: "I didn't."

We turned.

"I didn't write that part." He was looking at his hands. "I told you. I made quite sure." He swallowed. "There isn't—there's no antidote. Not in the notebook. I never put that in."

"Then we shall have to find another," I said. "I know a man who might."

…

I do not know how to explain what happened in the next twenty-two minutes.

I have been told that it is a famous case. It is taught in two schools, I believe, as an example of the use of cross-disciplinary assets in an acute emergency; there is a diagram. They draw it as a flowchart, with arrows. I should like to say that it was like that, a smooth and ordered sequence. It was not. It was like being inside a large and noisy machine, at the moment when someone has pulled every lever at once.

Briona was on her telephone before the paramedic had set down his bag. She spoke in a low flat voice, and she did not stop. She called the duty officer at the Bureau. She called the Deputy Director's office, and got an aide, and said a sentence that included the words immediate risk to life. She called the keyholder at Eighth Street, who was asleep in Cherry Hill, and got him on his feet. She had the evidence room open, and a man standing in it with a flashlight, in eleven minutes by the clock above the door.

Ryder was a different matter.

He was not in the building. He had gone home at four that afternoon, with the permission of everybody, and had put his head on a pillow at half past five. Leo rang him four times. On the fifth, a voice said, "Uh," and then, "Is it a fire?" And Leo said, "Kid, get up. It's life and death," and then, in a tone I had not heard from him, "Please."

He was in a taxi in six minutes. He was in front of the evidence-room table in nineteen.

…

I watched it by video, on a phone propped against the plastic jug of water. I sat beside Arlo with my arm resting against his, because he would not lie down, and the medic had put a blanket round him and a cannula in the back of his hand, and was watching the monitor with the expression of a man doing a sum.

Ryder wore the same T-shirt as before: TURN IT OFF AND ON AGAIN. He had put on his glasses crooked. His hair stood out at one side. His hands, in white gloves, were trembling, and he held them out in front of him a moment, and looked at them, and said in a small voice: "Sorry. Give me a second."

"Take it," said Briona.

"I can't. We don't have it."

"Then take half."

He laughed, wildly, and set to work.

I will not describe it. I did not understand it, and I do not think I was meant to. He had a black notebook open on the steel, and a photograph on a laptop, and a glass ampoule held up to the light in a pair of tweezers. He read out numbers. He said L-0417-D. L-0417-D. That's a, hold on. That's a precursor, that's a salt, that's the carrier. He turned a page, and turned another. He said, Oh. Oh, he's put the date. The date's the key. The key to the cipher is the date he started. He said, What's the date? What's the date he started? And a very small and breathless voice said, from the chair beside me:

"The twenty-third of October."

Everyone went still.

"It's always been the twenty-third," said Arlo. "It's the only number I ever really had."

Ryder's mouth fell open.

"Twenty-three," he whispered. "Ten. Twenty-three. Oh, God. Oh, that's—" And he bent over the page again, and his hands began to fly.

…

At eleven minutes past one, he looked up.

"I have it," he said.

"What is it?" said Briona.

"I don't know what it is." His eyes were enormous. "But I know what he wrote. He wrote down the name of the compound. Not the formula, just the name, and the trade name of the intermediate. It was a supplier's name. He ordered it from a specialty house, in Delaware, under a university account, in March." He swallowed. "It's a real thing, Agent Lang. It's in the literature. It's a hepatotoxin used in animal studies. I think there's a paper."

"Send it," said Briona.

"Sending."

I took out my own telephone. I had the number ready. It was written on the back of a business card, in a spiky foreign hand, and I had carried it in my wallet for eleven weeks, since a certain evening in the Medical Examiner's suite.

It rang four times.

"Pierce."

It was a flat, dry, tired voice, with the faint flavor of Glasgow. I had met him exactly once: a thin stooped man in a stained white coat, in a poison-control unit on the third floor of University Hospital, with a mug of tea and a gift for saying very little.

"Dr. Pierce," I said. "This is Atticus Vaughn. I am sorry to wake you. I have a patient. He is a male, twenty-six, who took a preparation orally at four o'clock yesterday morning, now nineteen hours and forty minutes ago. I have the name of the compound. I would like you to tell me whether it is treatable."

There was a silence on the line. Not a long one. I heard a light snapped on, and the creak of a bed.

"Say the name," said Dr. Pierce.

I said it.

There was another silence. I counted it. It was four seconds, and it was the longest I have ever known.

"Dr. Vaughn," said Nolan Pierce, slowly. "Where is the patient now?"

"In an interview room at the Roundhouse. The ambulance is outside."

"Then get him in it."

"Can you help him?"

"I can try." I heard the rustle of clothes. "That compound has a window. Thirty-six hours from ingestion. After that the damage is progressive. Before it, if the specific agent is started early, the survival rate is better than eighty percent. It's not nothing." A pause. "He's nineteen hours in?"

"Nineteen hours and forty minutes."

"Then we've got sixteen. I'll need ten of them to make the antidote." His voice sharpened. "It isn't on the shelf. It has to be prepared. But if you give me the name, and a clear line, and no more delays, I'll have it in his arm by hour thirty-one. Do you hear me? Hour thirty-one. Not a minute later."

"I hear you."

"Then stop talking," said Dr. Pierce, "and move."

…

They carried him out on a stretcher, though he protested. He lay under a blanket with a green mask over his face and the monitor trailing a wire. His eyes, over the rim, were very bright and rather bewildered.

I walked beside him down the corridor. Leo went ahead, clearing the way with his shoulders. Briona followed, speaking into her telephone in a low voice. At the doors a rush of cold air came in from the street, and a light rain was falling on the flashing blue of the ambulance, and I put my hand on the rail.

"Atticus."

"I'm here."

"I don't understand." His voice was thin under the mask. "You've got it. You've got the whole case. The statement. Everything. And you've thrown it away. Why?"

I walked a little way beside him. I thought about the question.

"Because I should rather have a witness than a martyr," I said. "And because I do not think you are finished."

"I was finished."

"No." I smiled down at him. "You were waiting. There is a difference. You have been waiting for fifteen years for someone to come. You told me so. I am sorry it took so long. But I am here, and I would like you to be here also."

He looked at me over the green plastic.

He lifted his left hand from the blanket, very slowly, and laid it on the rail beside mine. And his knuckles, long, thin, gray at the tips, came down on the cold steel with a small dry sound.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

I answered. Slow, slow, slow.

Then the doors of the ambulance closed behind him, and the siren began to wail.