Sanso knew by the tattoo on the left bicep—a dagger plunged into a stack of thousand-dollar bills—that the orderly who delivered his evening meal was no orderly at all. The sweat beading the man’s upper lip and the effort he made not to look into Sanso’s eyes confirmed it: he was a low-ranking felon in the Sanso empire, a plebe of a criminal kind, an expendable, untraceable member of the family who could make a risky delivery and be killed if necessary to cover a botched job.
Sanso had been expecting him.
The delivery boy put a covered melamine plate on Sanso’s bed table and rolled the meal within Sanso’s reach. He wiped the back of his hand across his perspiring brow.
“Took long enough,” Sanso complained. He’d ask later why the delivery had taken two more days than it should have, if all had gone according prelaid plans.
“Chef's apologies,” the man mumbled. “The first batch of potatoes was ruined.” He backed away from the bed and turned to rush from the room, his foot snagging the chair Janeal Mikkado had sat in. At least the oaf didn’t fall.
Janeal, Janeal. She understood so little, namely, that Sanso’s driving desire was not for Robert, who wasn’t worth Sanso’s time, but for her. He had known she would come to him. She had not disappointed.
Sanso lifted the plate cover, still happy to understand that he knew her so well. Gray green beans, a leathery Salisbury steak, a generous mound of leaden mashed potatoes. Jell-O. He had waited these many years for her to grow into her true self, and though he would never have made his own arrest the provocation for her to return, that had worked out nicely enough in the end. The better job he did of convincing her that Robert was his target, the more quickly she would cave to Sanso’s will.
To his plan for Janeal Mikkado’s life.
His plan to have her completely—not by force, but because she surrendered willingly. She would betray Robert to save her own skin, as easily as she had given him her father and her friend. Then her transformation would be complete.
This was a worthy pursuit.
He lifted the flimsy metal spoon and poked it into the large helping of potatoes. The spoon slipped sideways off of an invisible object. Sanso scooped it out. A syringe wrapped in plastic, and an unlabeled glass bottle. He unwrapped the mess and withdrew the capped syringe, slipping it under the sheets at his side. Then he lifted the bottle, which appeared to contain water but should, if Callista had done her work, contain enough carfentanil to bring down a gorilla in a matter of minutes.
And a man in a matter of seconds. With a potency eight thousand times greater than heroin, it would be quite a trip.
He tucked the bottle next to the syringe and ate the rest of his meal.
A different orderly cleared the uneaten food an hour later, and two hours after that the night nurse came on shift, checked the dressings on his side, and declared him progressing at a fast enough rate to get himself out of this prison and into another one within a day or so. Sanso didn’t speak to either of them.
At midnight, as every night, he heard the nurse tell someone outside his door that she was heading downstairs for a coffee. Did he want her to bring back the usual? Sanso couldn’t hear the answer but did hear the ding of the elevator doors tell him when she was gone.
He withdrew the glass vial and filled the syringe, then placed it in his left palm, needle down and thumb on the plunger. His left wrist was attached to the bedrail, which he lowered so that he could sit and swing his legs over the edge. His side burned where the bullet had clipped his liver and passed through. A minor injury, in his mind.
Sanso hollered. When the guard did not respond, Sanso fished the clean bedpan out of the foot of his bed and hurled it at his closed door.
The guard, a clean-cut, federal-looking guy with tidy black hair and shaven cheeks, leaned into the room, one hand holding the outside doorknob.
Sanso rattled the cuffs that kept his left arm attached to the bed. “Get a guy to the john?” he asked.
“I’ll get the nurse.” The door started to close.
“You seen her? You think you could do anything in a bathroom with her breathing down your neck?”
“You’ll live.”
“Cut me a break, please. Man to man.”
The FBI head reemerged. “Use the bedpan.”
“If I do that, what d’you think will happen next time I have to get your attention?” Sanso gestured to the place the pan had landed. “Get your partner to do it if you don’t want to.”
“If I were lucky enough to have someone else here to do your dirty work, I would.” He stepped into the room and leaned over to swoop up the pan, then took three steps toward the bed. The door swung closed and clicked.
“Throw this thing again, empty or full, and next time you can go in the sheets. That ought to endear you to the staff.”
His right arm swung to release the pan, sending it toward Sanso’s chest. Sanso leaned forward and let it bounce off, focused instead on the man’s outstretched wrist, which came close enough for Sanso to grasp with his free hand. In a swift move assisted by the element of surprise, he twisted the agent’s arm and spun the man around, pulling him toward the bed.
The guard reacted as fast, using the momentum of his spinning, falling body to wrench his wrist free of Sanso’s grip. The man got an extra quarter turn out of the spin, no doubt trying to prevent himself from landing on the bed with his back exposed, but that was all he accomplished. Sanso, having rotated the syringe in his cuffed hand so that it pointed upward, depressed the plunger at the same moment that the needle penetrated the fleshiest part of his opponent’s hip.
The man’s eyes went wide and he gasped, and Sanso threw the full weight of his body over the man, sending an elbow up under the agent’s chin to prevent him from shouting out, and thrusting a knee into the guy’s groin. A few repeated blows were enough to minimize the impact of the man’s flailing fists for the thirty seconds or so that it took him to wilt.
The agent was conscious but mostly paralyzed when Sanso released him and started patting his pockets for a key to his cuff. He hadn’t expected to be so winded. Sanso’s wrist was bleeding where the metal had cut him in the contortions of the scuffle, and the syringe was bloody. He let it drop and kicked it away under the bed.
Sanso found the key quickly, released himself, and started to strip the immobile man of his clothes. Lucky for him, the agent was about his size. Unfortunately for the agent, that meant he would undoubtedly not survive this ordeal. His eyes had already closed, and his breathing had become labored. The shirt cuff button snagged on a wedding ring when Sanso tugged it off. Nothing he could do about that. These men should marry their jobs and nothing else if they cared about anyone in the world.
He mentally judged that he had about four more minutes before the night nurse returned. Not that he was concerned about what it would take to put her out; it would merely be inconvenient.
In one minute he was dressed. In less than two he was in the elevator, headed for the lower level garage, using the agent’s phone to summon Callista and willing the wound in his side to stay closed.