"Dr. Smith is... is in his office."
They went in, guns drawn. Koldstad took point.
They found Harold Smith behind his desk, clutching his throat and lunging for something behind him.
"Freeze! IRS!"
His face turning purple, Harold Smith ignored the order.
"Dammit, I said 'Freeze!'"
Someone shouted in Koldstad's ear. "He's going for a gun!"
Koldstad fired a warning shot past Smith's gray head. It struck the plate-glass window behind him, bringing it down in large, dangerous shards.
A flat triangle of glass struck Smith on the head. He went down.
Koldstad rushed to his side, knocked the glass away and turned him over.
Smith's face was a strange color-purple gray. The gray was giving way to the purple hue.
"He's going into cardiac arrest!" an agent said.
Koldstad saw the crumpled paper cup in Smith's hand and noticed the water dispenser. "Dammit, he's choking. Get him some water!"
While an agent struggled with the water dispenser, Jack Koldstad fought to pry Harold Smith's strong jaws open. Smith set his teeth, and his jaw muscles hardened to stone.
"Stop fighting me, dammit! I'm trying to save you!"
Smith clenched his teeth all the more. He was coughing violently, and the cough had nowhere to go except out his nose. Expelled air mixed with hot mucus spattered Koldstad across the face.
"Dammit, Smith. I'm trying to help you!"
His eyes rolling up in his head, Smith clawed Koldstad's face with blunt fingernails.
"Give me a hand here!" Koldstad shouted.
Two agents dropped to their knees in the cramped space behind Smith's desk and fought to hold the elderly man down.
"What's wrong with this guy? He doesn't want to be saved."
"Maybe he swallowed poison," an agent suggested.
"Where's that doctor, dammit? Who knows the Heimlich maneuver? We can't have another casualty. It'll be our pensions."
Then a voice like a brass gong filled the room.
"Hold!"
All heads turned toward the sound. Koldstad's head came around. And he couldn't believe his eyes.
A tiny Asian man stood in the room. He was hardly more than five feet tall, looked older than God and wore a kimono that belonged on a geisha. The door was blocked by two armed IRS agents. Yet he had gotten past them. The twin dumbfounded expressions roosting on the guard's faces told that tale.
"Who the hell are you?" Koldstad said hotly.
"I am Chiun, personal physician to that man you are manhandling. Stand aside, barley drinkers, for only I can help him."
"Barley-"
"Make haste if you wish to spare his life."
Koldstad hesitated. Smith let go with another violent suppressed cough, and the hot mucus that splattered across the front of Koldstad's coat decided him.
"Give that man room to work."
The agents withdrew as the tiny Asian knelt.
"O Smith, speak the words I wish to hear."
Smith opened his mouth.
"Kkk-"
"I do not understand you, Smith."
"He's trying to say something, but there's something caught in his throat," Koldstad said.
And as Koldstad watched, the tiny Asian used two delicate-looking fingers to pry apart Harold Smith's jaws. Koldstad had tried the same thing, and his strength hadn't been near enough.
But the old guy acted as if he were picking apart the petals of a rose. Smith's jaws parted. He hacked.
Keeping the jaws apart with one hand, the tiny Asian reached into his mouth to get at the obstructing object lodged deep within.
"You'll need to Heimlich him to get it out, whatever it is."
"Silence! I need silence to save this man."
Then the old guy began massaging Smith's angular Adam's apple with a caressing thumb.
Smith heaved out a violent hack, and something seemed to pop up from his mouth. It was white, and Koldstad tried to track it with his eyes. He lost it as it sailed past the old doctor's shoulder. Koldstad blinked. It seemed to disappear in midair. He approached, face quizzical. He hadn't heard the sound of the white object falling to the floor. The floor was polished pine. There should have been a click.
While Koldstad was searching the floor, Harold Smith subsided.
"Speak, Smith."
"Kikk-"