Chapter 5 - The Phantom Nerve
Dr. Jonathan Albright did not look like an assassin. He looked like an emeritus professor of pathology: seventy-four years old, with soft, liver-spotted hands, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a tweed three-piece suit that smelled of peppermint lozenges and formalin.
He carried a worn pigskin doctor’s bag that had probably seen home births in the 1960s.
"Good evening, Maxwell," Albright said as he entered the third-floor bedroom at ten past five. He set the bag on the cedar lowboy and began unbuckling the brass clasps. "Donald tells me you were having a rough afternoon. Spasticity acting up?"
Maxwell was lying on his side on the four-poster bed, his back turned to the door, covered to his waist by a linen sheet. Martha stood by the washstand, rinsing a porcelain basin with her back half-turned to the physician.
"The pain is deep today, Jonathan," Maxwell said, his voice muffled by the pillow. "The ribs. The hip sockets."
"Yes, yes. The weather," Albright said, his voice a soothing, grandfatherly purr. "The barometric pressure drops, and the scar tissue contracts. Quite normal for this stage of chronic degeneration. But we have your Zurich formula. This should give you four or five days of absolute quiet."
Albright turned his back to the bed and opened the leather kit.
Martha watched him in the beveled mirror above the dressing table.
The old doctor reached into the velvet-lined pocket of his bag and pulled out an amber vial identical to the one Martha had examined the night before. His movements were practiced, steady, completely devoid of nervousness. He had done this dozens of times. He was a professional executing a slow-motion execution with an eight-gauge needle.
He drew three milliliters of the clear, slightly viscous fluid into a disposable glass syringe, flicked the barrel twice to displace an air bubble, and laid it on a sterile gauze pad.
"Who’s the girl?" Albright asked suddenly, not turning around.
"Martha," Maxwell said. "She’s helping Miss Delaney with the linens."
"I prefer privacy during these procedures, Maxwell. You know the intramedullary technique requires total concentration."
"She’s leaving," Maxwell said.
Martha turned, wiping her hands on a dry towel. She looked directly at Albright. "I’ll empty the basin, Doctor."
As she passed the lowboy, her elbow clipped the edge of his open bag.
The pigskin satchel tipped. Two prescription pads and a blood pressure cuff tumbled onto the floorboards with a dull thump.
"Blast it, girl!" Albright snapped, his professional veneer cracking into irritation as he bent down to catch his instruments. "Watch your feet!"
"I'm so sorry, sir! I'm so clumsy—"
Martha dropped to her knees, instantly fussing with the papers, gathering the cuff, her body shielding the lowboy for three seconds.
In those three seconds, her right hand moved with the blinding, automated precision of an emergency room nurse.
Her fingers slid the loaded glass syringe from the gauze pad and dropped it into the deep front pocket of her apron. From her sleeve, she produced another syringe—identical in volume, identical in scale, filled not with Albright’s neurotoxin, but with sterile bacteriostatic saline mixed with five milligrams of vitamin B-complex to give it the same faint amber tinge.
She laid the dummy syringe on the gauze pad.
She stood up, holding Albright’s leather notebook out to him with downcast eyes and trembling fingers. "I'm so sorry, Doctor. Truly."
Albright snatched the notebook from her hands, his face flushed red above his stiff collar. "Get out. Downstairs. Now."
"Yes, sir."
Martha walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.
She didn't go downstairs.
She stepped into the linen alcove six feet away, pulled the stolen glass syringe from her apron, and slipped it into a padded transport tube she had hidden among the folded pillowcases.
Through the heavy oak door, she heard the low, rhythmic murmur of Albright’s voice:
*"Now, Maxwell... deep breath. You're going to feel a sharp prick near the L3 space... then the cold spread. Just let it relax you. That's it. Let the legs go."*
Martha pressed her back against the wallpaper, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped sparrow.
The saline wouldn't hurt him.
But it wouldn't paralyze him, either.
In forty-eight hours, the remaining botulinum and conotoxin analogs already in Maxwell’s muscle tissues would begin to clear his metabolic pathway. The liver would conjugate the toxins; the kidneys would filter them into his urine.
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And for the first time in four hundred and twenty days, Maxwell Rourke’s brain was going to send a message down his spinal column—and find nothing standing in its way.
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