“I found a ring on the coffee table. Did you put a hot drink on it without a coaster?”

“It was Uzi,” Gabriel said.

Chiara poured the fettuccine into a colander and frowned. “He’s such a slob,” she said. “I don’t know how Bella can live with him.”

Chapter 14

14

The items she had requested lay arranged on an adjacent cot: isopropyl alcohol, cotton swabs, rubber gloves, tweezers, needle-nose pliers, a straight razor, codeine and cephalin tablets, four-by-four sterile pads, medical tape, two eighteen-inch strips of wood, two rolls of bandaging, and two liters of bottled water. She held out her cuffed hands to the one she thought of as Cain. He shook his head.

“I can’t do this with my hands cuffed.”

He hesitated, then removed them.

“The drugs you gave me after you kidnapped me—you have more, I assume.”

Another hesitation, then a reluctant nod.

“I need them. Otherwise, your friend is going to suffer terribly.”

He walked over to the van and returned a moment later with a syringe wrapped in plastic and a vial of clear liquid. Elizabeth looked at the label: KETAMINE. No wonder she’d suffered such terrible hallucinations while the drug was in her system. Anesthesiologists almost never used ketamine without a secondary sedative such as Valium. These idiots had given her several injections of the drug with nothing to blunt its side effects.

She loaded an appropriate dosage, two hundred and fifty milligrams, and injected it into the wounded man’s upper arm. As he slipped slowly into unconsciousness, she broke the needle off the syringe and placed it in the plastic sack from the chemist shop where Cain had purchased the medical supplies. The name and address of the shop were written on the bag in blue lettering. Elizabeth recognized the village. It was located on the Norfolk coastline, northeast of London.

She lifted the blanket and adjusted the lamp, so that the light shone directly into the wound. The round was lodged within the fracture fragments. She opened the bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured a generous amount directly into the wound, then wiped away the puss and other infectious material with a cotton swab. When the wound was sufficiently clean, she sterilized the straight razor and used it to debride the ragged necrotic material along the edges. Then she sterilized the tweezers and spent the next twenty minutes carefully removing fragments of shattered bone and filaments of embedded fabric. Finally, she sterilized the needle-nose pliers and slipped them carefully into the wound. The round was out a moment later, deformed from its impact with the terrorist’s tibia but intact.