“You’re still drugged.” Joseph pushed the water glass back towards the other’s lips.
“No!” Halstead cried out in English, pushing the glass away and almost knocking it out of the doctor’s hands. Then, in German, “I’m of perfectly sound mind, Herr Doktor. Just let me know when he returns.”
Joseph turned his head away from his prostrate patient at the distant sound of a door opening. “Well now, that must be him—”
Doctor Joseph was too surprised to resist the pair of arms thrown across his shoulders and neck. The arms gave a powerful, adrenaline-laden jerk, and then Halstead was easing the body of the doctor with the broken neck to the floor of the makeshift operating room.
Joseph’s assistant walked into the operating room with a small bowl of watery stew in each hand, and stopped to look down upon the bandaged patient crouching over the dead doctor. The anesthesiologist turned from the sight, and even managed to make it halfway across the reception room before one of Joseph’s freshly scrubbed scalpels landed in his neck. Only then, as he writhed in agony on the floor amidst the mess of stew he had made, did he attempt to cry out. It was already too late to make sufficient noise to be heard beyond the deserted hallway outside the office, as the scalpel was firmly lodged in his larynx and Halstead was rapidly approaching from the adjacent room.
Halstead, suddenly woozy again after the effort of a second murder, eased his own body into a chair in a far corner of the room. After a minute of recovery, he was in action again, dragging the body of his latest victim to a secluded spot behind the operating table, covering it with its white operating coat, and then dressing his own body with the three piece suit he had arrived in that afternoon. He made a quick search of the files on the doctor’s desk and stuffed his medical records in the suitcase he had taken from the hotel with him.
Halstead departed Charité Hospital under the protective cover of darkness, looking like yet another wounded soldier with his bandages as he walked the halls towards the main doors. Once he was outside the confines of the hospital, his gait was even quicker than before, and aimed in the direction of the train station.
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