Dead or Alive

  What was this? Am I dying? Is this death? But it wasn’t death. Somehow he knew that and—

  For the first time the Emir felt the beginnings of fear. He didn’t understand what was happening. He only knew it would be very bad.

  To Clark it looked as though the man was going to sleep. His body had stopped moving. There had been a few jerks and some little spasms, like a man settling to go to sleep in bed, but they’d stopped with surprising rapidity. The face became vacant, not focused, not proclaiming strength and power and lack of fear. Now he had the face of a mannequin. The face of a corpse. He’d seen that often enough in his life. He’d never thought what it was like for the mind behind the face. When death happened, the problem with that body was over for all time, allowing him to move on to the next problem, leaving this one behind for all time to come. It had never been necessary for Clark to destroy the body. When it died, the body was finished, right? Part of Clark wanted to approach the doc and ask him what was happening, but he didn’t, unwilling to disturb the man in charge of the current operation quite yet....

  He could feel all of his body. It was all a matter of crystal clarity to Saif. He couldn’t move any of it, but he could feel it all. He could feel the blood pumping through his arteries. But he couldn’t move his fingers. What was this? They’d stolen his body from him. It was no longer his. He could feel it but not command it. He was a prisoner in a cell, and the cell was ... himself ...? What was this? Were they poisoning him? Was this the onset of death? If so, shouldn’t he welcome it? Was the face of God just moments away? If so, he told his mind to smile. If his body couldn’t move, then his soul could, and Allah could see his soul as clearly as a large stone in the midst of the sea. If this were death, then he would welcome it as the culmination of his life, as a gift he’d given to so many men and women, the opportunity to see Allah’s face, as he would soon do ... yes ... He felt the air entering his lungs, giving him the last few seconds of life as these infidels stole his life from him. But the Lord Allah would make them pay for this. Of that he was sure. Completely sure.

  Pasternak checked his watch again. Coming up on two minutes, coming up on the last part. He turned and looked at the resuscitator. The green pilot light was on. The same was true of the ventilator. He’d have them when and if he needed them. He could restore this bastard’s life. He wondered what Mike would think of that, but that thought was far too distant for him to latch on to it right now. What happened after death was unknown to living men. Everyone found out eventually, but none could return and relate it to the living. The great mystery of life, the subject of philosophy and religion, believed, perhaps, but not known. Well, this Emir guy was getting a look, of sorts. What would he see? What would he learn?

  “Just a moment now,” Pasternak told those around him.

  The Emir heard that and understood the words. Just a moment until he saw God’s face. Just a moment before Paradise. Well, he’d not gone all the way he’d hoped to go. He’d not become the world leader of the Faithful. He’d tried. He’d tried his best, and his best was very, very good. Just not good enough. That was a pity—a great pity. So much he could have done. Someone else would have to do it now? Ahmed, perhaps? A good man, Ahmed, faithful and learned, good of heart and strong of faith. Perhaps he’d be good enough.... The Emir felt the air going in and out of his lungs. He felt it so clearly. It was a beautiful feeling, the very feeling of life itself. How was it that he’d never appreciated it, the beauty of it, the wonder of it?

  Then something else happened—

  His lungs were stopping. His diaphragm wasn’t—wasn’t moving. The air wasn’t coming into his lungs now. He’d been breathing since the moment of his birth. That was the first sign of life, when a newborn screamed its life to the world—but his lungs weren’t filling with air. There was no air in his lungs now. ... This was death coming. Well, he’d faced death for the last thirty years. At the hands of the Russians, the hands of the Americans, the hands of Afghans who’d not accepted his vision of Islam and the world. He’d faced death many, many times—enough that it held no terrors for him. Paradise awaited. He tried to close his eyes to accept his destiny, but his eyes wouldn’t close. He still saw the panels of the drop ceiling over his head, just off-white rectangles that looked down at him without eyes. This was death? Was this what men feared? How strange a thing, his mind observed, waiting, not with patience but confusion, for the final blackness to overcome him. His heart continued to beat. He could feel it, thumping away, pumping blood through his body, and thus bringing life, bringing consciousness, soon to end, of course, but still present. When would Paradise come to him? the Emir wondered. When would he see Allah’s face?

  “Respiration stopped at three minutes, sixteen seconds,” Pasternak reported. Chavez wrote that down, too. The doctor reached for the ventilator mask, checking again to be sure the system was turned on. He hit the button on the mask and was rewarded by the mechanical sound of rushing air in the rubber mask. Then he took the paddles off the resuscitator and pressed them to the man’s chest, turning his eye to the EKG readout on the small computer screen. Normal sinus rhythm, he saw.

  That wouldn’t last long.

  The Emir heard odd sounds around him, and he felt strange things but was unable even to make his eyes go look for the source of the sounds, locked as they were on the white ceiling panels. His heart was beating. So, he thought rapidly, this is what death is like. Was it like this for Tariq, shot in the chest? He’d failed his master, probably not because he’d been sloppy, just because the enemy in this case had been overly skillful and clever. That could happen to any man, and doubtless Tariq had died shamed at his failure to fulfill his mission in life. But Tariq was now in Paradise, the Emir was sure, perhaps enjoying his virgins, if that was really what happened there. Probably not, the Emir knew. The Koran didn’t say that, not really. Enjoying the favor of Allah. That was sure enough, as he, the Emir, was about to discover. That would be sufficient.

  It started to hurt some, right there in the center of his chest. He didn’t know that when his breathing had stopped, so had stopped the infusion of oxygen into his system. His heart, a powerful muscle, needed oxygen to function, and when the oxygen stopped, then the heart tissues went into distress ... and would soon start to die; the heart was full of nerves, and they reported the lack of oxygen as pain to his still-functioning brain. Great pain, the greatest pain a man could know.

  Not quite yet, but going that way ...

  His face showed nothing at all, of course. The peripheral motor nerves were all dead, or effectively so, Pasternak knew. But the feelings would be there. Maybe they could measure that on an electroencephalograph, but that would just show traces of black ink on white fan-fold paper, not the searing agony that the tracings represented.

  “Okay,” he said quietly. “It’s starting now. We’ll give him a minute, maybe a little more.”

  Trapped within his nonfunctioning body, Saif felt the onset of pain. It started distantly, but it increased steadily ... and quickly. His heart was being wrenched from his chest, as though a man had reached inside with his hand and was pulling it out, ripping the blood vessels as he did so, tearing it loose like wet paper from a destroyed book. But it wasn’t paper. It was his heart, the very center of his body, the organ that provided life to the rest of him. It seemed to be on fire now, burning like kindling wood on open ground surrounded by rocks, burning, burning, burning ... inside his chest, burning. His heart was burning alive, burning as he felt it. Not beating, not sending blood to his body, but burning like dry wood, like gasoline, like paper, burning, burning, burning ... burning while he lived. If this was death, then death was a terrible thing, his mind thought ... the worst thing. He’d inflicted this on others. He’d shot Russian soldiers—infidels, all of them, but still he’d ended their lives, put them through this ... and thought it amusing? Entertaining. Part of Allah’s will? Did Allah find this amusing, too? The pain continued to grow, to become unendurable. But he had t
o endure it. It would not go away. Nor could he. He could not run from it, not pray aloud to Allah to stop it, not deny it. It was there. It became all of reality. It overwhelmed all of his consciousness. It became everything. It was a fire in the middle of his body, and it was burning him up from the inside out, and it was more terrible than he’d ever imagined it to be. Was not death quick in coming? Was not Allah merciful in all things? Why, then, was Allah permitting this to happen to him? He wanted to grit his teeth to fight against the pain—he wanted, he needed, to scream aloud to protect himself from the agony that lived inside his body.

  But he couldn’t command his body to do anything at all. All of reality was pain. Everything he could see and hear and feel was pain. Even the Lord Allah was pain....

  Allah was doing this to him. If everything in the world was God’s will, then had God willed this on him? How was that possible? Was not God a god of infinite mercy? Where the hell was His mercy now? Had Allah deserted him? Why?

  Why?

  WHY?

  Then his mind faded into unconsciousness, with a final epilogue of searing pain to see him on his way.

  On the EKG readout, the first irregularities showed up. That got Pasternak’s attention. Ordinarily in the OR, as anesthesiologist, it was his job to keep watch on the patient’s vital signs. That included the EKG machine, and he was, in fact, rather a skillful diagnostic cardiologist himself. He had to pay very close attention now. They didn’t want to kill this worthless fuck, and more was the pity. He could have just given him a death such as few men had ever experienced, a fitting punishment for his crimes, but he was a physician, not an executioner, Pasternak told himself, pulling himself back from the edge of a tall and deadly cliff. No, they had to bring this one back. So he reached for the ventilator mask. The “patient,” as he thought of him, was unconscious by now. He pressed the mask onto his face and pressed the button, and the machine shot air into the flaccid, deflated lungs. Pasternak looked up.

  “Okay, mark the time. We’re breathing him now. Patient is doubtless unconscious now, and we’re infusing air into his lungs. This ought to take three or four minutes, I think. Could one of you come over here?”

  Chavez was closest, and came at once.

  “Put those paddles on his chest and hold them there.”

  Ding did that, turning to look at the EKG readout. The electronic tracings had settled down and were repeating themselves regularly but not in sinus rhythm, something his wife might have recognized but to him were just like things he’d seen on TV. To his left, Dr. Pasternak was hitting the ventilator button at regular intervals of maybe eight or nine seconds. “What’s the score, Doc?” Chavez asked.

  “His heart is settled down now that it’s getting oxygen. The succinylcholine will wear off in another couple of minutes. When you see his body moving, then it’ll be mostly over. I’ll breathe him for another four minutes or so,” the doc reported.

  “What did he go through?”

  “You never want to find that out. We gave him the equivalent of a massive heart attack. The pain would have been intense—I mean, really miserable. For him, maybe that’s just too damned bad, but it would have been pretty fucking awful. We’ll see how he responds to it in a couple of minutes, guys, but he’s been through something that nobody will ever want to repeat. He probably thinks he’s just seen the bottom floor of hell. I guess we’ll see what that does—did to him—in a few minutes.”

  It took four minutes and thirty seconds before the legs moved. Dr. Pasternak looked at the EKG readout on the resuscitator and relaxed. The Emir was out of the influence of the succinylcholine, and his muscles were now under the control of his nerves, the way they were supposed to be.

  “He’ll be unconscious for a few minutes, until his brain is fully suffused with oxygenated blood,” the anesthesiologist explained. “We’ll let him awaken normally, and then we can talk with him.”

  “What’s his mental state going to be?” This was Clark asking the question. He’d never seen anything even remotely like this before.

  “That depends. I suppose it’s possible that he might remain strong and resistive, but I would not expect that. He’s been through a singular and very, very adverse experience. He will not want to repeat it. He’s been through pain that makes childbirth seem like a picnic in Central Park. I can only speculate how dreadful it’s been for him. I don’t know anyone who’s been through this—well, maybe some people who’ve been through massive coronaries, but they don’t usually remember the intensity of the pain. The brain doesn’t work that way. It erases great pain as a defense mechanism. Not this time. He will remember the experience of it, if not the pain itself. If that experience doesn’t frighten him beyond anything he’s ever experienced, well, then we’re talking about John Wayne on amphetamines. People like that do not exist in the real world. There’s the complication of his religious beliefs. Those can be pretty strong. How strong, well, we’ll have to see, but if he resists us from this point on, I will be surprised.”

  “If he does, can we repeat the experience?” Clark asked.

  Pasternak turned. “Yes, we can—almost indefinitely. I’ve heard around the shop at Columbia that the East German Stasi used this technique to interrogate political and espionage prisoners, and that it was uniformly successful. They stopped using it—I don’t know why. Maybe it was too evil even for them. As I said yesterday, this is off the syllabus from the Josef Mengele School of Medicine. The guy who ran the Stasi was Jewish, as I recall—Marcus Wolf, I think his name was—and maybe it affected him on that basis.”

  “How are you feeling, Rich?” Hendley asked.

  “I’m fine. But he isn’t.” The doc paused. “Will they still execute this guy?”

  “Depends on who ends up getting him,” Hendley replied. “If the FBI gets him, he’ll go through the federal court system, and if he does, then eventually he goes night-night at Terre Haute, Indiana, after due process of law. That’s not our concern, really.”

  Because what he’s just been through was quite a lot worse than that, Pasternak didn’t say. His conscience was under control, but it was making noise. This really was out of Josef Mengele’s play-book, and that wasn’t something calculated to make a New York Jew happy. But his brother’s body had never been recovered, squashed to atoms by the collapsing WTC tower. He didn’t even have a grave that he could visit with Mike’s kids. And this bastard had made that happen, and so Rich Pasternak told his conscience to be quiet. He was doing if not God’s work, then his family’s work, and that was fine with him. His conscience would have to be quiet about it.

  “What’s this guy’s name exactly?” Pasternak asked.

  Clark handled the answer: “Saif Rahman Yasin. He’s child number fifty-plus of his father, a man of commendable vigor, his dad was, also tight with the Saudi Royal Family.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know that.”

  “He hates the Saudi Royals more than he hates Israel,” Clark explained. “They tried to whack him about six years ago, but they blew the mission. He hates them because of corruption, so he says. I guess they have some—I mean, a huge amount of—money controlled by a relatively small number of people, and you’re going to get some, but compared to Washington, it isn’t all that bad. I’ve been there. I learned the language there back in the 1980s. The Saudis I’ve met are pretty good people. Their religion is different from mine, but hell, so are the Baptists. The Saudis want this mutt dead more than we do, believe it or not. They’d love to drive him to Chop-Chop Square in Riyadh and take his head off with a sword. To them, he’s spit on their country, and their king, and their religion. Three for three, and that’s pretty bad over there. Doc, the Saudis are not the same as we are, but neither are the Brits, okay? I’ve lived there, too.”

  “What do you think we ought to do with him?”

  “Above my pay grade, sir. We can always kill him, but better to do that in public—hell, do it at halftime at the Super Bowl with instant replay and color commentary from th
e network TV crew. I could live with that. But it’s really a bigger question than that. He’s a political figure, and his removal will be a political act also. That always screws things up,” Clark concluded. He had little in the way of political instincts, and didn’t really want any. His world was a simpler one: If you did murder, then you died for it. It wasn’t elegant or very “sensitive,” but it had, actually, worked once. As the legal system had worked a lot better before his country had been overrun with lawyers. But there was no going back, and he could not make it so. Clark had no illusions about ruling the world. His brain just didn’t stretch that far. “Doc, what you just put him through, was it really that bad?”

  “Far worse than anything I’ve ever come close to experiencing myself, worse than anything I’ve ever seen in twenty-six years of medical practice, worse than anything you can inflict on a person without killing him all the way dead. My knowledge of this is, really, theoretical, but it’s not something I’d want to go through myself for any reason.”

  Clark thought back to a guy named Billy, and his time in Clark’s recompression chamber. He remembered how coldly he’d tortured that little rapist fuck, how it had not touched his conscience one little bit. But that had been personal, not business, and his conscience still didn’t care much about it. He’d left him alive in a farm field in Virginia, later to be driven to a hospital and treated futilely for a week or so before the barotrauma had stolen his worthless rapist life. Part of Clark wondered occasionally if Billy liked it in hell. But not often.

  So this was worse than that? Damn.

  Pasternak looked down and saw the eyelids flutter. Okay, he was coming all the way back. Good. Sort of.