Snakehead

come like a slap in the face, and suddenly he was ready to fight back. These people thought he was helpless. They thought they’d covered everything. But they hadn’t noticed the missing scalpel. And there was something even more important that they’d overlooked—despite the fact that it was sitting there right in front of them.
    The plane.
    The pilot had climbed out, dragging a kit bag with him. It looked as if he was going to stay until Weinberg was ready to leave. Alex had no doubt that the Piper would be incapacitated, the engine closed down and the keys locked away. And Dr. Tanner would be fairly certain that no fourteen-year-old boy knew how to fly.
    But that was his mistake—to leave the plane, and everything inside it, moored to the jetty.
    Alex examined it, working out the angles, thinking about what lay ahead.

    They sent Alex to bed at eight thirty, and Nurse Isabel came into the room once he was tucked in. She was carrying two sleeping pills and a little cardboard cup of water.
    “I don’t want to sleep,” Alex said.
    “I know, dear,” Isabel replied. “But Dr. Tanner says you’ve got to get your rest.” She held out the pills. “It’s going to be a big day for you tomorrow,” she went on. “You’re going to need your rest.”
    Alex hesitated, then took the pills. He threw them into his mouth and swallowed the water.
    The nurse smiled at him. “It won’t be too bad,” she said. “You’ll see.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Or rather, you won’t…”
    They checked Alex’s room an hour later and again at eleven. Both times they saw him lying, utterly still, in bed. In a way, Dr. Tanner was surprised. He had been expecting Alex to try something. After all, Major Yu had warned him to take extreme care with this particular boy, and the fact was that tonight was his last chance. But it sometimes happened that way. It seemed that—despite his reputation—Alex had accepted the hopelessness of his situation and had chosen to find a brief escape in sleep.
    Even so, Dr. Tanner was a cautious man. Before he went to bed himself, he called the two guards, Quombi and Jacko, into his office.
    “I want the two of you outside the room all night,” he ordered.
    The two men looked at each other in dismay. “That’s crazy, boss,” Jacko said. “The kid’s asleep. He’s been asleep for hours.”
    “He can still wake up.”
    “So he wakes up! Where’s he going to go?”
    Tanner rubbed his eyes. He liked to get a good night’s sleep before he operated, and he was in no mood for a lengthy debate. “I’ve got my orders from Major Yu,” he snapped. “You want to argue with him ?” He thought for a moment, then nodded. “All right. Let’s do it this way. Jacko—you take the first shift until four o’clock. Quombi—you take over then. And make sure that dog of yours stays outside the whole time. I just want to be sure that no one goes anywhere tonight. Okay?”
    The two men nodded.
    “Good. I’ll see you tomorrow…”

    At three thirty that night, Jacko was sitting on the porch of Alex’s building, reading a magazine he had read fifty times before. He was in a bad mood. He had passed Alex’s window at least a dozen times, listening for the faintest sound. There’d been nothing. It seemed to Jacko that everyone had got themselves into a complete panic about this kid. What was so special about him? He was just one of the many who had passed through the hospital. Some had screamed and cried. Some had tried to buy their way out. All of them had ended the same way.
    The last thirty minutes of his watch ticked away. He stood up and stretched. A few yards away, lying on the grass, Spike cocked an ear and growled.
    “It’s all right, dog,” Jacko said. “I’m going to bed. Quombi will be here soon.”
    He belched, stretched a second time, and walked off into the darkness.
    Ten minutes later, Quombi took his place. The other man was the younger of the two and had spent almost a third of his life in jail until Dr. Tanner had found him and brought him here. He liked his work at the hospital, especially taunting the patients as they got weaker and weaker. But he was in a bad mood right now. He needed his sleep. And he didn’t get paid overtime for working through the night.
    As he reached the building, his eye was caught by something glinting in the grass just in front of the door. It was some sort of foreign coin. Quombi didn’t even wonder how it had gotten there. Money was