Excerpt: Her Artificial Heart

FROM INSIDE HER BRIEFCASE she pulled out a weirdly damp postcard which had likely been riding its dockside, brine-encrusted carousel for more years than she cared to know. Maybe this would tell her why she was being summoned to an island she’d never heard of.

Inquisitor’s Island, it stated in tiny print in one corner, is a far-flung promontory with a bloody past. Unloved and unclaimed by any nation, it lies in tortuous seas dead center of the Mediterranean. Below was a blurry photo of an island and an eight-pointed cross she recognized from the time of the Holy Crusades.

Let’s face it, if she was going to perform her brand of miracle then the nipple of rock in the photo didn’t look big enough for a needle exchange van—let alone a hospital.

The flip side had a sepia-tone graphic over which one could scrawl a greeting like—Having a great time on Inquisitor’s Island. Wish you were here—Which would be dandy if the meticulously rendered background wasn’t of someone being burned at the stake.

Worst marketing campaign ever.

One hour after the hydrofoil departed Malta, a dark, iceberg-shaped island rose within the balmy Sirocco winds of a Mediterranean spring, and Claudia pressed her desert boots into the pebbled shoreline of Inquisitor’s Island for the first time.

If locals wanted to scare off visitors then the postcard might be enough. If not, a sulfurous metallic stench hanging in the air certainly would. Burned fat and singed hair was an odor she knew well from destroying diseased sheep on her mother’s farm in Romania. The coppery smell was from the hemoglobin in blood.

Ahead, in a dash for the dock an overfed rat jumped from a beachside bin labelled Biohazard. Not the farm girl’s first dance with a rodent with a piece of—What the hell was that between its teeth? She’d seen her share of wasted human flesh but never as lunch for a rat. Clearly, something was not up to code.

As her boot sent the thing tumbling, a joyless man with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder crunched forward from the shadows of a palm tree. If he wasn’t a Middle Eastern guerrilla fighter of the type often in the news, he sure had the garb down pat. Scarves billowed about his head and lower face. A brocade vest over a Nehru shirt, floppy flood pants, and untied high top runners completed the look.

She stood there doing the three-arm juggling act with her briefcase, backpack, and medical bag, and feeling way out of her depth as to what this guy was here for. Was he supposed to be guarding or protecting her? An indolent movement of his arm toward a concrete pad with an aerial gondola made it clear—he wasn’t a welcoming party and she could carry her own damn bags.

He stuck a key fob into a slot and the car, spacious enough to seat a dozen passengers along its plush bench, sailed up the same vertical cliff visible from miles away.

The man paced incessantly, turning their glass bubble into a tilt o’ whirl. For Christ’s sake sit down. She eyed the assault rifle and kept her mouth shut.

It was right after they skimmed over a shack humming with a noisy generator that the unmistakable crackle and roar of fire sprang up. She gagged and yanked her cotton turtleneck over her mouth as the full force of the earlier stench struck.

On a broad rock ledge below, guards trudged between a pile of white oblong sacks and a brick incinerator spewing sparks and soot. The workers hoisted one or two sacks over their shoulders and when they reached the glowing oven, they upended the contents and tossed the sack aside.

As Claudia’s car floated directly overhead, a breeze kicked aside the pall of smoke and the two tasked with feeding the incinerator stopped and raised their red, sweat-streaked faces upward. She reared back, struck dumb, because now she could see what they held in their hands—the limp bodies of children.

What the hell was this place, and why was her friend here? Or was she? Claudia fumbled her phone from her briefcase only to find neither a cell signal nor data connection.

With her palms flat against the glass, the scene dropped away, but hands soon gripped her shoulders and forced her down to the seat. Bugger off. She glanced at the semi-automatic again and bit into her curse.

Before the car had even ground to a halt on the lip of a ridge, the guy hopped out and marched out of view where flagstones dove into a discordant tangle of deciduous and palm trees.

Daphne Technologies. Trespassers Will Be . . . she took a wild guess at the last ammo-riddled word of the sign.

Hyper alert, her pulse still racing from the dead children, she silently bid him good riddance, and with her backpack slung across her back, the rest in each hand, she trudged along the twisted, downward-sloping route until she caught up minutes later. He was smoking and chatting with a compatriot stationed at a ten-foot-high iron gate—the chain link fence to each side decorated with barbed wire and voltage warnings.

A pretty flowering hedge would have been a reason for pause—she passed through and assigned the place extra marks for consistency.

Across a shallow strip of packed red earth lay her final destination; Claudia lifted her eyes to the farthest reaches of an Old World facade carved straight from the face of a limestone cliff. Broad stone steps led to a pair of formidable Hellenic-era pillars which framed a double-sided cast iron entrance door. Engraved into the iron was the same crusader cross from the postcard and the Latin phrase: Tuitio fidei et obsequium pauperum.