Inside his body, the deadly march of the toxin had already begun; his nose ran blood, his kidneys swelled with pus, his testicles shriveled. But he had time left, time before these things ended his life.

So he waited patiently for his chance, wanting to move on them before they could move against him, something dimly remembered from the war days. Kill or be killed.

The time would come soon.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The small, twin-engine Cessna touched down at the one-strip airport in Edmundston, “the Land of the Porcupines,” at ten past three Thursday afternoon. The ride from Boston had been rough, and now Amanda Seigel felt the queasiness in her stomach kick up a notch. She was scared, no doubt about that, though the reason for that fear refused to come to the surface. Jonathan hadn’t called, that was true, and when she tried the police in St. Boudin, they couldn’t help her, either—nobody that she talked to had ever seen or heard from a tall, bulky man with a scarred face (though when she mentioned that he was her patient and might have become, well, sick, she could have sworn there was an unusually long silence at the other end of the line). But still, there was no reason for her to get on a plane and fly up here, really. She was only a doctor, after all, and there were plenty of other, more qualified people to deal with problems like these. She didn’t need to make it her own personal crusade.

Except for that feeling she had, the feeling that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong, and that she was at least partially to blame for allowing him to go in the first place. Amanda Seigel did not allow herself to blame the hospital board and its cutbacks, or the government and their disappearing funds—she was not the type to set the blame on others.

She had spent most of yesterday looking up descriptions of sensory deprivation experiments. She had found plenty of descriptions, and they all pointed in the same direction. One had been a study done by a well-known scientist with a sensory deprivation tank, a tank filled with water in which the subject floats for hours without light or sound. She recalled studying the experiment in school. The scientist had found that without sufficient input and stimulus from the outside environment, the mind tends to wander. After an hour in the tank, during which the subject can’t see, hear, or smell, he begins to hallucinate, have lengthy conversations with beings only he can see, and experience flashbacks to childhood memories.

That set her heart pounding because, though she realized that Jonathan should have work to keep him busy, the deepest reaches of the Canadian woods in winter were just a little bit like a sensory deprivation tank. All that snow, the silence, the loneliness. He would be isolated, and he was still a little bit unstable.