Chapter 17: Captured
John steps out of the same elevator he and Sherlock were in last night. The hallway on the 16th floor is still empty, but doors are open and he can hear voices. He feels confident and efficient in his sleek new suit, even if it does still smell of second-hand smoke and sweat from the club: It still looks good. It's not like he's actually seeking a job. He walks down to the door marked Director of Transplant Services. It is closed, and he gives it a brisk knock.
"Come," calls a woman's high voice. John is startled and looks at the door tag again. Oh. G. Linley. Not sex specific. He had leapt to a conclusion. He opens the door to a large corner office. The windows of both exterior walls are floor to ceiling, with a foggy, grayed view of the woods reserve beyond some smaller buildings. The furniture is ostentatious mahogany, and the books along the shelves do not look well used. John sees all this at a glance and quickly approaches the woman seated behind the desk.
She stands to shake his hand briskly across the surface. "Dr. John Watson?"
She is about his height, with a stout figure and thick fingers on broad hands that do not look like a surgeon's should. Her hair is brittle and overbrushed, a frayed bleached blond, but her suit is expensive and she wears a lot of heavy looking jewelry.
She gives him a piercing look, but does not smile. "I'm Dr. Georgia Linley. Have a seat," she orders.
John's tentative smile dies on his lips. Ok. So this is how it's going to be.
She pulls the fax of his CV in front of her. "It says here you're recently back from serving with the RAMC," she begins.
"Yes," John replies.
"Kept your skills sharp over there, did you?"
"I did a lot of trauma surgery," he agrees. "Not only abdominal, of course. You can't specialize in a war zone." He closes his jaw with a click, coming to the viscerally-felt conclusion that he does not want to discuss Afghanistan with this unappealing woman.
She keeps her flat, unnerving gaze on him, not blinking. "Of course not," she says. He has the impression she's not really engaged. She types something onto her keyboard without looking. "We've become very busy lately," she says. "We don't have enough surgeons to accommodate our new renown. We have patients on the wait list who will be flying here from all over the world."
"Yes," John says into the pause. "I did some research-"
The door behind him opens, and he flinches around, just stopping himself from twisting forth his knives. A familiar face pokes around the door. It is Goatee from the club. His gaze skates past John's tense form without recognition. "Coffee, Doctor?" He eels through the door, both hands holding white mugs with the hospital name in blue. She looks back, expressionless. "Please. Dr. Watson will have some as well, won't you?"
John spreads his hands out in the universal gesture for whatever you say, keeping affable although his tension is ratcheting up logarithmically.
Goatee, today wearing a white lab coat, passes him to place a mug very precisely on the desk coaster in front of Dr. Linley. Then he turns and is extending the mug out to John when
suddenly he has a lapful of scalding coffee
and as he leans forward in an instinctive defensive gesture, the goateed man falls on him, gravity and bodyweight crushing him into a bent, awkward position over his own knees.
John's knives are out in an instant, and he jabs upwards at the body covering his own. His head is down, and all he can see is his lap, but he feels the knife score, slice through skin and muscle and skitter across bone. The ribs, then, or perhaps an arm. There's a muffled grunt. John twists, sinks and slithers to the side, but the hands grabbing him aren't holding him the right way
they
are
sticking him in the shoulder with a needle.
John uses his opponent's distraction to thrust away again, and knocks the man to the floor. He hears Dr. Linley snap something about where did the fucking weapons come from, as he wrestles the man to the floor. He's not a trained fighter, this man, and John rolls on top of him soon enough. There's blood soaking the lab coat, and the man is cursing and gasping. He is easy to subdue. John leans forward, straddling him, holding his arms in a vicious crush above his head with one hand. The other has a blade at his throat.
But something is very wrong. There are two, then three of him. Six knives. The room begins to spin.
Fuck, John thinks. Not good. He feels his head begin to jerk around on his neck and the room fades into gray. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out, and in the next second … nothing. He falls onto the man beneath him, and the knives disappear.
John opens his eyes and slowly realizes that he is in a typical surgical operating theater. He's been in enough of them to feel certain of this conclusion, but he can't for the life of him imagine why he's here. He blinks slowly at the white walls and monitors, the trays of instruments, video scopes, lights and other apparatus of the cold, sterile room.
He stares dizzily for a while. It's off. Something about the angle is off. Oh! He's lying down. On his stomach. Only one eye is focused, the other jammed into the bedding, which explains the odd lack of depth to the image. He lifts his head a little, and woozily drops it back almost immediately. Right. Yeah. He attempts to rub his eyes, and realizes his hands won't move. Hospital bed restraints. Of course. He clumsily tries to shake a foot: no freedom there, either. Jesus.
The events leading to this rather awkward situation begin to come to him. The hospital. Dr. Linley. The goateed man and the coffee. The stab of a needle. He thinks with some satisfaction that he must have caused that man considerable injury and it had to have hurt him like hell to drag a body in here and toss it on the bed. He can hear the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor speed up. That's me, he thinks. They've got me hooked up. What the hell? He's shirtless, he realizes. He can feel the tacky adhesive of electrodes clustering on his chest and back. It's cold.
A door opens somewhere near his feet, and he struggles to twist his head around enough to see. He doesn't want anyone sneaking up to him. The door closes with a swish and two sets of feet walk to him, one moving briskly on tapping high heels and the other unevenly shuffling. The dynamic duo, then.
The woman comes into view. "So. You're awake."
That's so obvious that John doesn't attempt to reply. Not that he would anyway. He contorts to watch her. She's like the fucking Leaning Tower of Pisa from this angle, and he squeezes his eyes shut to combat a wave of dizziness. "Wha' di' y' give me?" he slurs.
"M99."
"What? Christ. An elephant tranquilizer?" He's surprised he's still breathing.
"A very low concentration," Dr. Linley replies. "I had diprenorphine on hand, if I needed it."
Ah. Great. An antidote for just in case. He wonders how long he's been out. Possibly hours.
"I've got something else for you, too," she says tonelessly. "Then we're going to talk."
The heart monitor reveals that his heart is jumping, and John hates that it's giving away his secrets. "What-" he begins, as she walks to his other side. He clumsily flips his head in the other direction, and sees that she's standing next to a drip pole. Christ, have they run an IV while he was unconscious? He begins to jerk and strain, trying to pull his hand away, but wide, sheepskin-padded leather prevents him from twisting them in the slightest. He twitches and curls his fingers, but it does nothing to dislodge the cannula from his hand. He strains for his knives, but they're unavailable, the constraints on his wrists keeping them in. Sherlock's experiment runs through his mind: Limitations. Dammit. Why couldn't the restraints be around his forearms instead?
Dr. Linley smirks and injects a solution into the port on the IV line.
"What is it?" he asks thickly.
"Nothing to hurt you," she says. "I just want you in a more amenable frame of mind."
John's heart thunders for another minute, and then very suddenly settles, slowing dramatically. The monitor reports the change to the world. It's a chemical thing. He knows what is happening: it's another sedative. Mixed with what, god knows, but he's calm now. He's fucking floating. He giggles, knows he shouldn't, giggles again and then can't stop.
He lays his heavy head back down and stares at the sideways woman next to him. She's looking at her watch, impatiently tapping her foot. A man comes up behind her, white lab coat liberally doused with browning blood on one side. Stained gauze is wrapped abundantly over his shirt around his ribs. John grins wider. "I did that," he announces with satisfaction.
The bloody man snarls, but the woman holds him back. "Stay still, Bernie." She sneers at him. "You fumbled. You knew he was a soldier. Moron."
She turns back to John. "Do you know what Trapanal is?"
"Yes, of course I do. I'm doctor after all, you know. It's a brand name for sodium thiopental, a barbituate used in anesthesia, euthanasia and even psychiatric treatments. I imagine you're using it on me as a truth serum. Even though it doesn't make someone actually tell the truth. Just... harder to think of a lie. Was there anything else in that injection? It's probably mixing with the etorphine that's already in my system, which would explain this intense sensation of vertigo-"
"So, Dr. Watson. Bernie here said he saw you and another man sneaking around last night. Who was it and what were you doing here?"