The Book of Lies - Brad Meltzer [4]
“Forty . . . thirty-nine . . . thirty-eight . . .” Ellis began to count, peeking under the wrist of his starched shirt and checking his new Ulysse Nardin watch.
“Wait . . . ! The shot—! What’d you put in me!?” Zhao screamed, gripping the side of his neck.
“. . . thirty-seven . . . thirty-six . . . thirty-five . . .” Ellis said, his voice as serene as ever. “My family first encountered it in Belgium. Conium maculatum. Hemlock.”
“Are you—? You put hemlock—!? You put a poison—are you a fool!? Now you get nothing!” Zhao yelled, fighting hard as he thrashed and crawled toward the door.
In a way, Zhao was right. Shooting him was a gamble. But Ellis knew . . . it’s not a gamble when you know you’ll win. After unscrewing the empty hemlock vial, he replaced it with a vial filled with a cloudy yellow liquid.
“I-Is that the antidote?” Zhao asked. “It is, isn’t it!?”
Ellis stepped back, away from his victim’s reach. “Do you know who Mitchell Siegel is, Zhao?”
“Wh-What’re you talking about?”
“Thirty-one . . . thirty . . . twenty-nine . . . In 1932, a man named Mitchell Siegel was shot in the chest and killed. While mourning the death of his father, his young son Jerry came up with the idea of a bulletproof man that he nicknamed Superman.”
Mid-crawl, Zhao’s feet stopped moving. “M-My—! Wh-What’d you do to my legs!?”
Ellis nodded and stood still. To this day, scientists didn’t know why hemlock poisoning started in the feet and worked up from there.
“Such a dumb idea, right, Zhao—a bulletproof man? But the only reason Superman was born was because a little boy missed his father,” Ellis pointed out. “And the best part? The murder’s still unsolved. In fact, people are still so excited by Superman, they never stop to ask just why Mitchell Siegel was killed—or to even consider that maybe, just maybe, he might’ve done something that made him the bad guy in this story. . . . Twenty . . . nineteen . . . eighteen . . .”
“I can’t feel my legs!” Zhao sobbed as tears ran down his face.
“You think I’m the bad guy here, but I’m not,” Ellis said, putting away the empty vial, zipping his leather doctor’s case, and smoothing the sheets on the edge of the bed. “I’m the hero, Zhao. You’re the bad guy. You’re the one keeping the Book of Lies from us. Just like Mitchell Siegel kept it from us.”
“P-Please, I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about!”
Ellis crouched down next to Zhao, who was flat on his belly, barely able to catch his breath. “I want my Book. Tell me its final destination.”
“I—I—I told you,” Zhao stuttered. “W-We— It’s going to Panama.”
“And then where?”
“That’s it—Panama . . . ” he repeated, his nose pressed to the carpet, his eyes clenched in pain. “Just . . . the antidote . . .”
“You feel that tightening in your waist?” Ellis asked, looking down and realizing that his shoes could use a new shine. “Your thighs are dead, Zhao. Then it’ll climb to your testicles. Hemlock is what killed Socrates. He narrated his entire death—how it slithered from his waist, to his chest, right up to when his eyes were fixed and dilated.”
“Okay . . . okayokayokay . . . Miami! After Panama . . . they’re . . . it’s going to Miami! In Florida,” Zhao insisted. “The sheet . . . the lading bill . . . it’s . . . I swear . . . it’s in my pocket! Just make it stop!”
Ellis reached into Zhao’s pocket and extracted the sheet of light pink paper that held all the details of the shipment’s arrival.
. . . seven . . . six . . . five . . .
The dog began to growl. She could smell death coming. But Ellis ignored the noise, peacefully reading from the bill of lading: the container’s new tracking number, the receiver’s name (had to be fake)—everything the Leadership needed.
. . . four . . . three . . . two . . .
Still flat on his stomach and now with his mouth wide open, Zhao gave a final hollow gasp that sounded like the last bits of water being sucked down a drain. Ellis’s great-grandfather