Nothing to lose. Lose? He wasn't winning. Remo tried to taste the pill without letting it touch his teeth. No taste. The monk hovered over him. Remo nestled the pill under his tongue and said a very fast and very sincere prayer. «Okay,» he said.

«Time's up,» the guard's voice boomed.

«God bless you my son,» the monk said loudly, making the sign of the cross with the crucifix. Then, in a whisper, «See you later.»

He padded from the cell, his head bowed, the crucifix before him and his left hand flinting steel. Steel? It was a hook.

Remo placed his right hand on the cot and got to his feet. The saliva seemed to gush into his mouth. He wanted to swallow bad. Hold down the pill. Under the tongue. Right where it is. Okay, now swallow… carefully.

«All right, Remo,» the guard said. «Time to go.»

The cell door was open, with one guard on each side. A large, blond man and the regular prison chaplain waited in the center of Death Row. The monk was gone. Remo swallowed once more, very carefully, clamped his tongue down over the pill and walked out to meet them.

CHAPTER FOUR

Harold Haines didn't like it. Four executions in seven years, and all of a sudden, the state had to send in electricians to monkey with the power box.

«A routine check,» they had said. «You haven't used it for three years. We just want to make sure it'll work.»

And now, it just didn't sound right. Haines' pale face tilted toward the head-high gray regulator panel as he turned a rheostat. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced momentarily at the glass partition separating the control room from the chair room.

The generators moaned uphill to full strength. The harsh yellow lights dimmed slightly as the electricity drained into the chair room.

Haines shook his head and turned the juice back down. The generators resumed their low, malevolent hum, but just didn't sound right. Nothing was right about this execution. Was it the three-year layoff?

Haines adjusted his gray cotton uniform, starched to almost painful creases. This one was a cop. So Williams was a cop. So what?

Haines had seen four go in his chair and Williams would be his fifth. He'd sit in the chair too petrified to speak or move his bowels and then he'd look around. The brave ones did that, the ones who weren't afraid to open their eyes.

And Harold Haines would let him wait. He'd delay turning up the voltage until the warden looked angrily toward the control room. And then Harold Haines would help Williams by killing him.

«Something the matter?» came a voice.

Haines spun suddenly around as though a teacher had caught him playing with himself in the boys' room.

A short dark-haired man in a black suit, carrying a gray metallic attache case, was standing beside the control panel.

«Something the matter?» the man repeated softly. «You look sort of excited. Flushed in the face.»

«No,» Haines snapped. «Who are you and what do you want here?»

The man smiled slightly, but did not move at the sharp question.

«The warden's office told you I was coming.»

Haines nodded quickly. «Yeah, that's right, they did.» He turned back to the control board to make the final check. «He'll be here in a minute,» Haines said, glancing at the voltmeter. «It's not much of a view from where we are, but if you go to the glass partition, you can see fine.»

«Thank you,» the dark-haired man said, but made no move. He waited until Haines involved himself with his toys of death, then examined the steel rivets at the base of the generator cover. He counted to himself: «One, two, three, four… there it is.»

He carefully set the attache case at the base of the panel where it touched the fifth rivet in the row. The rivet was brighter than the others, and for a good reason. It was not steel but magnesium.

The man glanced casually around the room, Haines, the ceiling, the glass, and when he seemed to be focussing on the death chair, his right leg imperceptibly pressed the attache case against the fifth rivet, which moved an eighth of an inch.

There was a faint click. The man moved away from the panel toward the glass partition.

Haines had not heard the click. He glanced up from the dials on the board. «You from the state?» he asked.

«Yes,» the man said and appeared to be very busy watching the chair.

Two rooms away, Dr. Marlowe Phillips poured a stiff Scotch into a water glass, then put the whisky bottle back into the white medicine cabinet. Moments before, he had hung up the telephone. It had been the warden. He had almost shouted when the warden told him he would not have to perform an autopsy on Williams.

«Apparently, Williams has some unusual characteristics,» the warden had told him. «Some research group wants his body. Don't ask me what it's all about. I'm damned if I know. But I didn't imagine you'd mind.»

Mind? Phillips sniffed the beautiful alcohol aroma whispering comforting messages to his entire nervous system. He'd been prison doctor almost thirty years. He'd performed thirteen autopsies on electrocuted men. And he knew-no matter what the books said or the state said or his own knowledge and skill said-that it wasn't the chair that killed them, it was the autopsy knife.

The electric jolt numbed them, paralyzed them, destroyed their nervous systems and brought them to the edge of death. They would die. There was no saving them. But the autopsy, within minutes of the electrocution, really finished the job, he was convinced.

Dr. Phillips looked at the drink in his hand. It had started that way thirty years ago. His first autopsy and the «dead man» had twitched when the scalpel slipped into his flesh. It had never happened again, but it never had to. Dr. Phillips was convinced. And so it started. Just one drink to forget.

But not tonight. Just one drink to celebrate. I'm free. Let someone else kill the poor half-dead bastard, or let him die out his last few minutes in one piece. He gulped down the whisky and walked back toward the medicine cabinet.

The question stuck in his mind: what was unusual about Williams? His last physical had shown no irregularities, except for a high tolerance of pain and exceptionally fast reflexes. Other than that, he was perfectly normal.

But Dr. Phillips could not be bothered worrying about such trivia. He opened the medicine cabinet again and reached for the best medicine in the world.

It wasn't really a mile. It was too short for that. The whole damned corridor was too short. Remo walked behind the warden. He could feel the closeness of the guards behind him but he would not look at them. His mind was on the pill. He kept swallowing and swallowing, keeping the pill pressed beneath his tongue. He never knew he could create this much saliva.

His tongue was numb. He could barely feel the pill. Was it still there? He couldn't reach his hand in to find out for sure. Sure? What was sure? Maybe he should spit it out. Maybe if he could see it again. And if he saw it, what then? What would he do with it? Show it to the warden and ask him for an analysis? Maybe he could run to a drugstore in Newark, or take a plane to Paris and have it examined there? Yeah, that would be fine. Maybe the warden would go for that. And the guards. He'd take them all with him. What were there, three of them, four, five? A hundred? This was a whole state against him. The last door loomed ahead.