Shit, he thought. He’d told Arora they were in trouble, and now they really were. He glanced across at the doctor, thinking of the syringe in his pocket and wondering if he should finish the job, salvage something, but then decided that discretion was the better part of valor. It was time for his grand exit.
“What’s going on out there?” snapped Arora.
“Oh, nothing,” said Ibrahim airily. “Just an ambulance arriving. With any luck the occupant will have some fresh organs for us.”
“You’ve seen sense at last, have you? You’ll stick to doing things through the usual channels?” said Arora with audible relief.
“That’s right, old man,” said Ibrahim. “You win. But for now I have business to attend to. I’ll be in touch.”
And with that he left, trying to look as casual as possible, even as he hurried out of the darkened office and into the corridor beyond, heading for the elevator.
They’d be in the reception area by now, he thought, probably making their way to the elevator. There were four of them. If they had any sense they’d send one guy up the stairs, a couple in the elevator, one keeping an eye on the reception area.
In other words, they’d have the exits covered.
Shit.
He stepped away from the elevator, looking wildly left and right. Emergency exit. There. He trotted toward it, steeling himself for an alarm as he pressed the bar.
It stayed silent. It wasn’t alarmed. Yes. Now he found himself on a set of gray-painted back stairs. Not that he was an expert on evacuation protocol, but he’d bet that going down would lead him out into the parking lot.
Bye bye, suckers, he thought, closed the emergency exit door softly behind him, and descended.
Sure enough, at the bottom was a second door. This time an alarm did sound, but he didn’t care, the wailing accompanying him as he trotted away from the open door and toward his van. There were times he’d wondered about the wisdom of driving such a conspicuous vehicle, but the advantage was you could quickly find it in a parking lot. He fumbled for the keys and, glancing back at the hospital, he saw security men carrying walkie-talkies arrive at the open emergency exit. Abruptly the alarm stopped.
“Ibrahim,” came a voice, and he swung around to see a figure standing between the vehicles, blocking his way to the driver’s door. Moonlight scuttled down the long curved blade of a scalpel.
Ibrahim stood and gaped. It took a second, but he recognized the newcomer. “It’s you,” he said, forehead furrowing beneath his skullcap. “What do you want with me?”
“I’ve come to collect your dues,” said the man.
He stepped forward, his knife hand swept upward, and Ibrahim looked down to where his clothes and the stomach beneath had parted. His hands reached to collect his intestines as they spilled from his stomach cavity, and for a split second he thought he might simply push them back inside and everything would be all right. But instead they slithered from his grasp and slapped to the asphalt of the parking lot, and in the next instant Ibrahim followed them, keeling forward to land on top of his own heaped insides.
Chapter 101
JACK AND SANTOSH stepped out of the elevator on the fifth floor of the hospital to be confronted by Dr. Arora, who looked taken aback.
“Is there something I can do for you two gentlemen?” asked the doctor.
Jack and Santosh both looked up and down the deserted corridor, Jack’s hand inching toward the Colt slung beneath his leather jacket. “You all right?” he asked the doctor.
“Yes, I’m perfectly well, thank you. Now, I ask you again: what are you doing here?”
“Where’s Ibrahim?” said Santosh.
Arora stepped back, suddenly wary. “I’m quite sure I don’t know who you mean.”
“We’re working on a theory that Ibrahim is behind the recent spate of serial murders,” said Jack. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“No,” smiled Arora, as though talking to a small child. “But you can be assured that if I did I would convey my suspicions to the police rather than to…well, you two gentlemen. And if you’ve quite finished, I think I should like to go home for the evening. Perhaps you would care to share the elevator?”
Silently the three men descended to the ground floor, where Dr. Arora bid them farewell then left for his car.
The Private team watched him go, frustrated that Ibrahim had evaded them and hardly able to believe that Arora was simply walking away, the butcher strolling to his Jaguar.
Jack spoke for them all when he said, “You know what, guys? I think I’d have preferred it if he’d been murdered.”
A second later there came a commotion from outside. They ran toward the noise and there found the body of Ibrahim.
Chapter 102
DR. ARORA ARRIVED home, closing the door behind him and locking it. Those people at the hospital, were they something to do with that agency Ibrahim had told him about? And while on the subject, what had gotten into Ibrahim? Why had he been acting so strangely?
On second thought, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now. Dr. Arora had made a decision. He was leaving Delhi. Let them wallow in their own filth. Let them sort it all out. He’d always said, half jokingly, that the advantage of being a single man with no kids was that you could always make a quick exit if you needed to.
Half joking. Always in the back of his mind was the fact that the same extracurricular activities that had paid for the large, well-appointed house in which he now stood, the Jaguar, five-star hotels, and high-class hookers, might also one day require him to disappear at a moment’s notice. He’d seen Heat. That De Niro quote about how you needed to be able to leave in thirty seconds if you felt the heat around the corner? Dr. Arora had taken that to heart.
But he was going to make things slightly easier for himself. He was going to leave in thirty minutes. He shrugged himself out of his jacket as he passed through the large reception hall of his home, opened the double doors that led into the dining room.
He stopped.
Laid out on the dining-room table were three large jars and a plastic funnel. Inside one of the jars was a human heart. The second was full of blood. The third one was more difficult to distinguish in the low lights of the room, but it looked like…
It was. Preserved in some kind of liquid was a large lump of skin that was pressed up against the glass, floating like a gelatinous marine specimen.
The killer. He was here. Arora turned and tried to run but a figure stepped out from behind the door, a glittering hypodermic syringe in his hand. The attacker’s arm swung in a blur. The next thing Arora saw was the floor as it rushed to meet him.
Chapter 103
ARORA AWOKE FROM the sedative—etorphine, if he wasn’t very much mistaken—to find himself taped to one of his own dining chairs and seated in a privileged position at the head of the table.
And there they were, still laid out in front of him. The jars.
Oh God.
“Are you hungry?” came a voice from behind, and he twisted his head to see the intruder move from his rear to the edge of his peripheral vision. All he saw was a man in black.