Page 71 of Mastermind

“Poison.” Zlate walks back to her office and uses a key to open up a cabinet. She pulls a plastic pill bottle from inside and hands it to me.

The label says “Niacin,” but when I open it up and take a whiff, I detect the distinctive scent of almonds. I show the bottle to Jessica. “Arsenic,” I tell her.

Zlate nods. “‘Did they eat the pills?’ the man on the phone asks. I say no, they smell bad. ‘No,’ he tells me, ‘the pills are fine.’ But I don’t believe. ‘Then you eat the pills,’ I tell them. And then they call no more.”

“Who are these men?” asks Jessica.

“They said they were doctors, but I do not believe. One man is Russian; the other, Chinese? I took job from ad in paper. Nursing license not necessary.”

“What did they do here?” I ask.

“Secret government research, they said. ‘Where do these men come from?’ I asked, but they say, ‘Don’t worry.’ But I worry. Each man . . . his mind is gone, like scrambled. Here, let me show you.”

Zlate motions us over to a man sitting on a bed, staring at the clock on the wall. “Medev, look this way,” she tells the man.

He turns his face in our direction. Zlate points to a small scar at the side of his eye near the bridge of his nose. “When he arrived, he was still bleeding from here. Same as the others.”

“A lobotomy?” asks Jessica.

“Yeah. Like the kind they did fifty years ago,” I reply. “Apparently someone’s kept the tradition going.”

“I’ve heard rumors the Chinese still do it. Rumors, mind you, but it’s easier than shooting patients up with Thorazine.”

Medev turns his head back to the wall and goes back to whatever internal thoughts he was thinking. If it’s anything like what I’ve experienced when I’ve had my brain tampered with against my will, it’s not a lot of thoughts at all.

“Who are these men?” asks Jessica.

“I do not know. They do not say much. Their accents are from all over. Prisoners, perhaps? Patients of a mental hospital? I do not know.”

Jessica takes out her phone and starts to walk around the room, taking photographs of each man. Most of them are barely aware that she’s there. One reaches a hand toward her hair, and she gently pushes it away by grabbing at the wrist—a judo technique.

“I need to know exactly what happened here. What was the condition of these men when they arrived? Were they healthy? Were they sick?” I ask.

“Some were healthy. Some were not.” She points to a stretcher. “Some arrived barely alive.”

Interesting. Was this some kind of convalescence stop after treatment at another facility? Did the men who did this care what happened to the patients afterward?

“The sickest ones, the ones that arrived on stretchers, where are they now?” I ask.

Zlate points to Medev and five other men. “They are the ones that got better.”

“What about the ones who didn’t?”

She shakes her head. “They are buried outside with the rest.”

“The rest?”

“Yes. The ones there was no hope for.”

“How many was that?” asks Jessica.

“I lost count. Many.”

Suddenly concerned, I tell Jessica to step back. “How exactly did they die?”

“They had the disease,” replies Zlate.

“What disease?”