Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [289]
As practiced the night before, Chavez and Dominic laid the Emir on the workbench. His right arm was cinched into the leather restraint, while the right, the one on the same side as the equipment, was stretched across a folded towel and similarly secured. Finally, both legs were locked down. Chavez and Dominic stepped back from the bench.
Now Pasternak began powering up the equipment: first the EKG, then the ventilator, followed by a self-diagnostic test of the manual external defibrillator. Pasternak then turned his attention to the wheeled cart beside the table, on which lay an array of syringes and bottles. All of this the Emir watched closely.
He had to be curious, Jack thought, and he must be inwardly terrified. Nobody could be that indifferent to what was going on around him, all the more so a man who was fully accustomed to being the ultimate and total boss of everything that happened around him, used to having his every order obeyed with alacrity. The world around him was no longer in his control. There was no way he could be comfortable with that, but he retained a sense of dignity that was, in its way, rather impressive. Okay, he was courageous, but courage was not an infinite quality. It had its limits, and those in the room with him would be exploring those limits.
Dr. Pasternak rolled up the Emir’s shirtsleeve and unbuttoned his shirt, then stepped away from the table, reached to the cart, and retrieved a plastic syringe and a glass vial. He checked his watch and looked up.
“I’m going with seven milligrams of the succinylcholine,” Pasternak said, measuring the amount carefully into the plastic syringe as he withdrew the plunger. “Somebody write that down, please.” On the chart Pasternak had asked Chavez to maintain, Ding wrote the information down: 7mg @ 8:58. “Okay …” the physician said. He stabbed the syringe into the brachial vein just inside the elbow and pushed the plunger in.
There was no real pain for Saif Rahman Yasin, just the momentary prick of something piercing his skin inside the elbow, and the needle was soon withdrawn. Were they poisoning him? he wondered. Nothing overt seemed to be happening. He looked at the man who’d just stabbed him and saw a face that was waiting for something. That was vaguely frightening to him, but it was too late for fear. He told himself to be strong, to be faithful to Allah, to be confident in his faith, because Allah could handle anything men could do, and he, the Emir, was strong in his faith. He inwardly repeated his profession of faith, learned as a small boy more than forty years before, from his own father at the family house in Riyadh. There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet. Allahu akbar. God is great, he told himself, thinking his profession of faith as loudly as he could in the silence of his own mind.
Pasternak watched and waited. His brain was racing. Was he doing the right thing? he wondered. It was too late to worry about that, of course, but even so, his mind asked the question. The man’s eyes looked into his now, and the doctor told himself not to flinch. He was the one in control. Completely in control of the fate of the man who’d killed his closest relative, his beloved brother, Mike, the man who’d ordered the man driving the airplane to crash into the World Trade Center, causing the fire that would weaken the structural steel, and dropping the entire Cantor Fitzgerald office a thousand feet to the streets of lower Manhattan, crushing to death more than three thousand people, more than had been killed at Pearl Harbor. This was the face of the fucking murderer. No, he would not show weakness now, not before this fucking barbarian….
The man was waiting for something, the Emir thought—but what? There was no pain, no discomfort at all. He’d just injected something into his bloodstream. What was it? If it was a poison, well, then the Emir would soon see Allah’s face, and could report to Him that he’d done the Lord God’s will, as all men did, whether they knew it or not, because