Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [77]
Twenty or more guerrillas were scattered around, squatting on their haunches and staring into space, waiting with aboriginal patience. Masud was not there, Jean-Pierre noticed on looking around, but two of his closest aides were. Ellis was in a shady corner, lying on a blanket.
Jean-Pierre knelt down beside him. Ellis was evidently in some pain from the bullet. He was lying on his front. His face was taut, his teeth gritted. His skin was pale, and there was perspiration on his forehead. His breathing sounded harsh.
“It hurts, eh?” said Jean-Pierre in English.
“Fuckin’-A well told,” said Ellis through his teeth.
Jean-Pierre pulled the sheet off him. The guerrillas had cut away his clothes and had put a makeshift dressing on the wound. Jean-Pierre removed the dressing. He could see immediately that the injury was not grave. Ellis had bled a lot, and the bullet still lodged in his muscle obviously hurt like hell, but it was well away from any bones or major blood vessels—it would heal fast.
No, it won’t, Jean-Pierre reminded himself. It won’t heal at all.
“First I’ll give you something to ease the pain,” he said.
“I’d appreciate that,” Ellis said fervently.
Jean-Pierre pulled the blanket up. Ellis had a huge scar, shaped like a cross, on his back. Jean-Pierre wondered how he had got it.
I’ll never know, he thought.
He opened his medical bag. Now I’m going to kill Ellis, he thought. I’ve never killed anyone, not even by accident. What is it like to be a murderer? People do it every day, all over the world: men kill their wives, women kill their children, assassins kill politicians, burglars kill householders, public executioners kill murderers. He took a large syringe and began to fill it with digitoxin: the drug came in small vials and he had to empty four of them to get a lethal dose.
What would it be like to watch Ellis die? The first effect of the drug would be to increase Ellis’s heart rate. He would feel this, and it would make him anxious and uncomfortable. Then, as the poison affected the timing mechanism of his heart, he would get extra heartbeats, one small one after each normal beat. Now he would feel terribly sick. Finally the heartbeats would become totally irregular, the upper and lower chambers of the heart would beat independently, and Ellis would die in agony and terror. What will I do, Jean-Pierre thought, when he cries out in pain, asking me, the doctor, to help him? Will I let him know that I want him to die? Will he guess that I have poisoned him? Will I speak soothing words, in my best bedside manner, and try to ease his passing? Just relax, this is a normal side effect of the painkiller, everything is going to be all right.
The injection was ready.
I can do it, Jean-Pierre realized. I can kill him. I just don’t know what will happen to me afterward.
He bared Ellis’s upper arm and, from sheer force of habit, swabbed a patch with alcohol.
At that moment Masud arrived.
Jean-Pierre had not heard him approach, so he seemed to come from nowhere, making Jean-Pierre jump. Masud put a hand on his arm. “I startled you, Monsieur le docteur,” he said. He knelt down at Ellis’s head. “I have considered the proposal of the American government,” he said in French to Ellis.
Jean-Pierre knelt there, frozen in position with the syringe in his right hand. What proposal? What the hell was this? Masud was talking openly, as if Jean-Pierre was just another of his comrades—which he was, in a way—but Ellis . . . Ellis might suggest they talk in private.
Ellis raised himself on to one elbow with an effort. Jean-Pierre held his breath. But all Ellis said was: “Go on.”
He’s too exhausted, thought Jean-Pierre, and he’s in too much pain to think of elaborate security precautions; and besides, he has no more reason to suspect me than does Masud.
“It is good,” Masud was saying. “But I have been asking myself how I am going to fulfill my part of the bargain.”
Of course! thought Jean-Pierre. The Americans have not sent a top CIA