Silent Night - By Tom Barber Page 0,18

with ways of combating the disease. Only a few treatments have been proven to work.’

‘Like chemotherapy,’ Josh said.

‘Yes. That’s one. Using radiation to kill the cancerous cells. It’s one of the most commonly used and the one most people are aware of. But ask anyone who has ever endured chemotherapy treatment about their experience. I guarantee it won’t have been pleasant.’

She paused and sniffed.

‘Chemo annihilates the cancerous cells, but it also kills other cells too. That’s why some patients lose their hair for example. It works but it destroys healthy cells in the process. My father was desperate to find a middle ground for treating lung cancer, given what happened to my mother. Something that could combat the cancer without affecting the patient in other ways. He was convinced that it was possible.’

She paused.

‘He tried many different things. None of them worked. He ended up down so many blind alleys, forced to go back and start all over again at square one. Time and again the same insurmountable problem cropped up that he just couldn’t navigate around.’

‘Which was?’

‘The strains he developed were too weak. They either didn’t work, or the cancer just overran them and ate them for lunch. So he decided to use an even stronger pathogen as a base. Something that if he could engineer and cultivate correctly, he knew for sure would annihilate the cancerous cells.’

‘Which was?’ Josh asked.

‘Tubercle bacillus.’

‘What’s that?’

She looked at him.

Then, for only the second time, she glanced at Archer.

‘Tuberculosis.’

Twenty four blocks downtown, the N Train carrying the three men from the Astoria diner swept into Times Square 42nd Street, the main transport hub in Midtown Manhattan. It eventually ground to a halt with a screech and the doors slid open. People started exiting the train and the three men carrying the bags joined them.

Moving down the platform, they walked up the stairs to the next level, the access floor for the various lines headed to different parts of the city. There were several cops up there, as well as some MTA employees and it was busy as hell, people walking in all directions, focused on getting to their destination.

No one paid any attention to the three men.

Anonymous in the crowd, the trio walked into the middle of the concourse and came to a halt, facing each other, all of them fighting the churning nervousness in their guts.

This was it.

Bleeker looked at his two companions.

‘Do what you need to do, then leave. Don’t hang around. We meet at the safe house, pack our shit and then we’re out of here.’

The men nodded.

Then they parted and headed off in three different directions.

The bags containing the shoeboxes held tightly in their hands.

‘This is bullshit!’ the skinny drug dealer shouted. ‘Bullshit, man!’

He was being led out of a Harlem tenement building on West 134 towards an NYPD Ford Explorer parked against the kerb. Several people were watching from the street, as well as an audience from the windows of apartments in the building, some of them wolf-whistling, others shouting abuse at the two detectives. Jorgensen had about ninety pounds on the dealer and almost carried him to the car, a large bear-paw of a hand enveloping the man’s upper arms on each side.

Arriving at the vehicle, he pulled open the rear door and pushed the drug dealer inside, sliding in after him and pulling the door shut. Behind them, Marquez had just stepped out of the building carrying a plastic bag stuffed full of various items. She walked around the front of the car to the driver’s door, then climbed inside and shut it, turning to face Jorgensen and the smaller man, the three of them alone and the interior of the car quiet.

‘You can’t do this, man,’ the skinny guy said, his hands cuffed behind him, sitting in the middle seat of the car. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Oh really?’ Marquez said.

She pulled something out of the plastic bag.

It was a large, thickly-packed transparent bag of marijuana leaves. The bag was about the size of a pillow case.

‘Then what do you call this?’

Pause.

‘That isn’t mine.’

‘What about these?’ Marquez said.

Reaching into the bag again, she pulled up a second thick bag of marijuana and a .45 handgun.

Cantrell swallowed.

‘Well, Pinocchio?’ Jorgensen asked him.

‘They aren’t mine either. You planted that shit.’

‘Do you even understand how finger-printing works, numb-nuts?’ Jorgensen said. ‘That’s how we found you. You’re telling me that if we run one layer of dust over those bags and the gun that your prints won’t show up?’

‘Don’t matter. You’re