Code White (21 page)

“Make sure one of you stays in there with him at all times,” said Lee. “Leave your gun outside. If he does decide to talk, call me immediately.”

Harry followed Lee out into the corridor. The isolation room was supposed to be soundproof, but he could still hear Rahman’s singsong reverberating in his ears.

There wasn’t time for games like this, thought Harry. The hospital didn’t have time. His mother on the eighteenth floor didn’t have time. Harry had to fight hard to suppress an expression of disgust.

Christ, what a privilege to see the pros at work!

*   *   *

Kevin was pacing back and forth in his lab, waving his fists so furiously that Loki hunkered trembling in the shadows behind his cage.

“Odin, what the fuck is going on?” he ranted. “How did Rahman get here? Why didn’t I know anything about it?”

“INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION WAS AVAILABLE TO ANTICIPATE THIS DEVELOPMENT.”

“You’re supposed to be the master of information. How did this shit get by you?”

“THE ARREST ORDER DID NOT PASS THROUGH THE HOSPITAL LANDLINES OR WIRELESS NETWORK. IT MUST NECESSARILY HAVE BEEN CONVEYED THROUGH A SECURE COMMUNICATIONS LINK. SPECIAL AGENT LEE HAS SUCH A DEVICE IN HIS POSSESSION. IT UTILIZES A SECTÉRA WIRELINE TERMINAL CONNECTED TO AN ENCRYPTED LAPTOP WITH A SATELLITE UPLINK TO SIPRNET AT THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.”

“Why can’t you decrypt it? Sectéra’s just an ordinary NSA Type 1 coding device. That should be child’s play for you.”

“DECRYPTION IS NOT THE PROBLEM. THE WIRELESS SIGNAL IS NOT STRONG ENOUGH FOR INTERCEPTION.”

“Not strong enough? That’s why I hung a relay transmitter behind the wall of Harry Lewton’s office. Is the fucking relay not working?”

“THE RELAY INSTALLATION ASSUMED THAT THE SECURE TERMINAL WOULD BE OPERATED FROM HARRY LEWTON’S DESK. HOWEVER, THE TERMINAL IS NOW POSITIONED IN THE CORNER OF THE ROOM. THERE IS A STEEL BEAM BETWEEN TERMINAL AND RELAY WHICH INTERFERES WITH RECEPTION OF THE SIGNAL.”

“Steel beam! Don’t just lay there like a bitch in heat and tell me there’s no signal. There has to be a signal! I absolutely have to know what is going on. They’ve got Rahman, and Rahman can lead them to me. I can’t afford to be blindsided like this! Find the signal! Clean it up!”

“IT IS TOO DEGRADED.”

“I don’t accept that. There must be something we can do.”

“I CALCULATE THAT IF THE POSITION OF THE RELAY WERE RAISED BY AT LEAST 2.25 METERS, THE INTERFERENCE WOULD BE CLEARED.”

“Raised how? It’s bolted to the fucking wall.”

“IT MUST BE RAISED MANUALLY.”

“Oh, Jeee-zus! You’re talking about climbing back down into that goddamned airshaft. It’s like the inside of a tin drum—with a grating opening up three feet behind Lewton’s desk. They’ll hear every move I make.”

“IF I WERE TO DETONATE UNIT COTOPAXI, ALL PERSONNEL NOW IN HARRY LEWTON’S OFFICE WOULD RESPOND IMMEDIATELY TO THE SITE OF THE EXPLOSION. THIS WOULD PROVIDE YOU WITH AT LEAST A TWENTY-MINUTE WINDOW TO REPOSITION THE RELAY WITHOUT DETECTION.”

“Cotopaxi? No—no explosions. Once we start setting off bombs, the Feds will go ape-shit and start cutting off cable lines, including the main fiber-optic connection to the hospital. If they do that, we can kiss the rest of our revenue stream good-bye. Let’s play it cool for now, Odin. The correct project sequence has to be maintained.”

“CAN YOU OBTAIN A SECONDARY RELAY UNIT?”

“Sure, I can have ’em FedEx the damn thing here by ten tomorrow morning.”

“THAT FALLS OUTSIDE THE PROJECT VESUVIUS TIMETABLE.”

“No shit! No, I mean the answer is no, Odin. That was sarcasm. I’m so fucking pissed that … No, I can’t get a secondary unit.”

“THEN MANUALLY REPOSITIONING THE RELAY IS THE ONLY VIABLE OPTION.”

“Fuck!” Grumbling, Kevin repaired to the back of the lab, where he yanked open the bottom drawer of a file cabinet and pulled out a small athletic bag stuffed with a pair of dark blue electrician’s overalls and a jangling melange of stainless steel belays and carabiner clips. Project Vesuvius was in full swing and it was dangerous to set foot outside the lab, but it was equally dangerous to operate in the dark. He had to know what the FBI was doing. He had to make a sortie. His margin of safety lay in acting decisively, and then getting back as soon as possible to his sanctuary, his fortress, which he and Odin had made all but impregnable.

His hands were shaking, but not from fear. It was the burst of adrenaline he had felt many times, dangling a thousand feet in the air by a single rope and piton. With his life on the line, he was single-handedly taking on the whole Gestapo—the FBI, the city cops, Harry Lewton. He was in the high, thin air now, above the tree line—a world of man-killing rocks and heartless glaciers, a place where courage and cowardice became tangible things, like an arm or a leg. There was no other thrill like it. It was better than sex.

Although the big monitor was out of view, Odin’s voice could be heard around the corner.
“THE MOST PRACTICABLE POINT OF ACCESS IS THROUGH THE VENTILATION GRATING IN ROOM PL-171, THE JANITORIAL CLOSET THAT LIES IMMEDIATELY ABOVE HARRY LEWTON’S OFFICE.”

Kevin nodded. “Make sure you keep an eye on me, Odin. Project Vesuvius is in your hands until I get back.” After pulling on the overalls, he grabbed a few coils of climbing rope from a hanger on the wall and stuffed them in the bag.

“WHEN SIGNAL HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY ACQUIRED, I WILL BLINK THE LIGHTS TWICE IN ROOM PL-171.”

“Okay, do that.” Heading toward the door, Kevin paused and looked into the dark recesses of the lab, behind Odin’s mainframe. Seeing two specks of orange light reflected from Loki’s retinas, he made a clicking sound with his tongue. “Come on, Loki, time to get back in your cage.” But Loki didn’t budge. Again Kevin clicked, and held out his hand. A nervous chitter answered, but Loki’s retinas withdrew deeper into the darkness.

“Fuck you, then,” said Kevin, as he opened the steel door of the lab. “I haven’t got time to mess with you now, but when I get back, you’ll be one sorry monkey.”

*   *   *

In overalls, Kevin was disguised from the casual eye, but he needed one small element to make his getup complete. Passing through the main lobby toward the Pike, he detoured to a small florist’s boutique in the back of the hospital gift shop. Behind the counter, he found a pretty young blonde in a pink dress and white apron. She was squatting with her back to him while she repositioned some vases in a floor-to-ceiling refrigerator.

“Is Todd taking you anywhere special?” came a voice from the rear of the shop. Kevin looked and saw a plump brunette at a work table, inserting greenery into an arrangement of white daisies and carnations.

“No. When it’s your birthday, you have to hang with your parents, don’t you?” said the blond in a voice redolent of bubble-gum-and-peppermint ice cream. “I mean, they, like, gave you life and everything. My mom would freak out if we didn’t go to the Olive Garden.”

“Well, bring Todd.”

“My dad
hates
him.”

“Your dad hates everybody.” The brunette turned the flower vase around, sizing up her finished arrangement. “So, you’re not gonna go see him after you get off work? You’re only here till three, aren’t you?”

“
Not!
I have to work late every day this week. I can’t drive unless I get some new tires. They’re, like, almost bald.” The blonde stirred her hands in the air, perhaps trying to give an impression of a baldness so extreme you could skate on it.

Kevin tapped on the glass counter. “Excuse me,” he said.

The blonde stood up and blushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry. Hi! How can I help you?”

“White ribbon. Ten-inch piece.”

“Just ribbon?”

Kevin nodded.

The girl turned her head pertly to one side. “We have half-inch and inch wide.”

“Half inch.”

She went to the end of the counter, where a couple dozen ribbon spools were arrayed along a bar, and snipped a piece of the white. “That do ya?” she asked, holding it up.

“Splendid,” said Kevin. As the girl passed to the register, he made note of the name on her ID badge. “Is this your birthday, Agnes?” he asked.

“Yeah.” She gave him a fleeting glance.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” she said. She took a moment to study the tax chart taped to the counter. “Comes to thirty-two cents. Three cents an inch, plus tax.”

Kevin dug underneath his overalls and brought a four-inch thick wad of bills out of his jeans pocket—everything he had withdrawn from his bank account the day before. He rarely carried more than twenty dollars on him, and the sight of so much money in his hand seemed incongruous, almost to the point of laughter.

“I can’t change that,” said Agnes, as Kevin handed a hundred dollar bill from the outside of the wad. “Don’t you have anything smaller?”

“Sorry.”

“I can’t change it.”

Kevin looked at Agnes, at her blue eyes and pale, peach-fuzz covered skin. She had a cockeyed smile, her lip curling higher on one side. She put so much zest into her smiling that she gave the impression it was a virtuoso skill to her, something she had made great strides at, but still hadn’t quite mastered. “That’s all right,” said Kevin, waving off a small plastic bag and picking up the ribbon. “Why don’t you keep the change?”

“What?” She couldn’t have been more shocked it he had offered her a sip of Kahlua out of a hip flask. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“Let me put it like this. How much extra will you make working late today?”

“Thirty.”

“Thirty dollars? There’s a hundred. Keep the change for yourself, but promise me you’ll take off work at, what is it, three o’clock?”

“Yeah, three.”

“No one should have to work late on their seventeenth birthday, should they? Call Todd, and tell him you’re getting off at three, and that you have a couple of hours to do something wild and crazy before settling down to dinner with your parents at the Olive Garden. Tell him you have a hundred bucks to do it with.”

“Are you, like, some kind of rich doctor or something?”

Kevin smiled. “What does it matter who I am? Just promise me one thing. Be out of this hospital by three o’clock. Three-thirty at the latest. Absolutely no later than three-thirty.”

“Okay, sure.”

“Then have a happy birthday, Agnes,” he said as he headed toward the Pike. He felt very good about himself—almost intoxicated, indeed, with good feelings about himself, and the hundred dollars, and the seventeen-year-old pink-and-white carnation to whom he had just given the gift of life.

*   *   *

With the white ribbon tied to his ID badge, Kevin now looked exactly like one of the scores of searchers combing the hospital. On his way through the crowded hallway to room PL-171, he succeeded in getting past two security guards, one four-man search team, and one doctor with whom he had copublished a paper on essential tremor—all without attracting a second look. But when he approached PL-171 itself, he encountered a more difficult problem. Directly across from the door to the utility closet, Kathleen Brown and her film crew had encamped, complete with lights and reflectors, to interview a pair of workmen.

The last thing he wanted was to show up on camera. He quickly ducked into a side-corridor, where he strolled about briefly before trying another pass. But the TV people showed no signs of moving on. His options were limited. He dared not linger out in the open. Scrubbing the mission was unacceptable. So he flipped up his collar and tried to push on through, keeping his back to the film crew, and trusting that a man in overalls entering a janitor’s closet would not attract attention.

He was wrong. Before he had even reached the door, he heard Kathleen Brown call out, “Dr. O’Day! Is that you?”

He paused in his tracks
. Okay, it can’t be helped. Best thing is to act natural and get rid of her.
“Uh, you … uh, yeah,” he said, looking back at her. “Just call me Kevin, okay? I don’t go in for that ‘doctor’ crap. Titles are for the intellectually insecure.”

She crossed the corridor toward him. “Any updates on how Jamie Winslow is getting on? Is the SIPNI device working?”

Kevin shrugged. “Shouldn’t you be telling me? Why aren’t you guys with the kid?”

“They won’t let us in to see him.”

“The hell with that. Talk to a guy named Brower. He runs the NICU. Give him a flattering close-up on TV and he’ll let you into his wife’s panty drawer.”

“Thanks. Actually, I’m glad I ran into you. I wanted to tell you how impressed I was by your interview this morning. That computer of yours—Thor? Is that its name?”

He looked at her incredulously. “Odin.”

“Of course, Odin. Truly amazing! What would you think about doing a feature segment on Odin for
Lifeline
?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You must be very proud of your work. I mean, Odin is so lifelike. Creating it must have been a lot like giving birth.”

She was so much like a pesky fly that he couldn’t resist taking a swipe at her. “Have you ever given birth, Kathy?”

“What?”

“Do you have kids, Kathy?”

“Why, no.”

“Then you really don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, do you?”

“It’s … it’s just an expression.”

Kevin noticed the little red light of the Betacam. “And why is that goddamned camera pointed at me? Why are you filming this?”

Kathleen Brown turned to the cameraman. “Oh, Dutch! Really! Give us a little space here.”

Dutch turned the camera off and let it slide down its strap so it pointed toward the floor.

“Sorry about that,” said Kathleen Brown. “In our line of work we just take it for granted.”

“Well, it pisses people off.”

She nodded sympathetically. “Listen, was that your wife in the operating room?”

Kevin was surprised.
What does she want with Ali?
“I, uh … Yeah, that was my wife.”

“You two seem so different from each other. Have you been married long?”

“Awhile.”

She stepped forward, almost brushing against him, and threw her chest out, giving him a clear view of her cleavage. Her voice turned soft and sultry. “Do you think she would mind if you and I had drinks together sometime? To talk about
Lifeline
.”