Code White (30 page)

The thought carried with it a wave of nausea. “Please let me out of here!” she said, turning toward Harry, while Rahman unleashed a guttural torrent of vituperation. “Now!”

At that moment, there was a noise behind her, and Ali turned to see the door open as two of the men who had presided over her interrogation—the short Asian and the tall African American—rushed into the room.

“What in God’s name is going on here?” shouted Lee in a thin, strained voice.

Rahman was still at fever pitch. “So, you have all ganged up to kill me!” he shouted to Lee and Scopes.

Seeing Harry, Lee’s eyes flared. “Both of you, out of this room! Now!” he said.

Scopes moved toward Harry to give the command some muscle, but Harry raised his hands in warning.

Rahman was yanking at the handcuff and jerking the bed forward. “I’m not afraid to die!” he screamed. “Don’t listen to this lying bitch! I’m not afraid!”

Lee extended his arm, pointing toward the open door. “That’s an order, Mr. Lewton!”

The veins in Rahman’s neck stood out like ropes. “Go on! Kill me! Paradise awaits!” he shouted.

Harry took Ali gently by the arm and started for the door. Suddenly, there was a crash as Rahman leaped to his feet, completely overturning the bed and smashing the frame against the floor in an attempt to break free.

“Kill me,” he bellowed, “but not until I have strangled this lying whore, this murdering she-wolf!”

Ali was knocked against the door jamb as the four uniformed police officers rushed past her into the isolation room. Harry pushed her quickly through the guardroom and into the ER corridor. Behind her she could hear the policemen cursing, the bed frame crashing, and above all Rahman screaming the
shahada,
the Arabic profession of faith, “
La ilaha illallah, Muhammadur rasulullah!”

“I’m sorry,” said Ali with her hand half-covering her mouth. “I tried to reach him, but I … I can’t. I’ve made things worse for you, haven’t I?”

“No,” said Harry, re-holstering his gun. “In fact, you’ve been very helpful.”

“How?”

“Well, for now let’s just say that some critical questions have been answered.”

“Are you in trouble with the FBI?”

“I can deal with them. But it might be best if you cleared out of here.” There was a rumble and then another metallic crash from the isolation room. “Why don’t you go on to the ICU? I’ll check back with you once things quiet down.”

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. It had been forty-five minutes since she had last checked on Jamie. “That’s where I belong right now. I’m of no use here.” She looked at Harry. He was standing straight as a ramrod, his jaw set forward a little, but his eyes were calm and gentle. She had trusted him and things had turned out a disaster, but his eyes told her not to worry.

She turned away and crossed through the Acute Psychiatric Unit, reaching the elevator just in time to stop the closing doors with her hand.

I misjudged this man,
she thought as she stepped inside.
He marches to his own drummer, and not at the bidding of the FBI. I am glad—glad—that I took a chance on him.

*   *   *

As Ali disappeared into the elevator, Harry turned to see Raymond Lee hastening toward him. “Mr. Lewton, that racket you hear is your career going down in flames.” Lee pointed imperiously toward an empty, semi-darkened X-ray room and ushered Harry into it.

“You’ve obstructed a Federal investigation and tampered with two material witnesses against my express orders,” he said. “That’s two felony counts. You have ten minutes to get your goddamned ass out of this hospital, or I’ll have you arrested.”

Harry squared his stance, although he kept his voice down low. “I’m sorry, but you can’t throw me out. Arrest me if you think you can explain that to the TV cameras. But until then, I’m a private employee of Fletcher Memorial. Only Dr. Gosling has the authority to relieve me of duty.”

“Oh, he will! By God he will! When I get through with you, you’ll be lucky to find a job guarding a lemonade stand!”

“First listen to me.”

Lee was waving his arms, pointing blindly at the ceiling. “Did you think we wouldn’t see you on the security cam?”

“Hear me out, for Chrissake! I’ve found out a thing or two.”

“Really? It better be fucking good.”

Harry waited and made Lee take a breath before he answered. “Well, for starters, there’s no setup between Al-Sharawi and O’Day. She’s telling the truth when she says she hasn’t spoken to him in years. I could see that in ten seconds. He’s got no hold on her whatsoever.”

“So you say.”

“And one more thing. I’m pretty sure the little weasel doesn’t know where the bomb is. He never once tried to bargain for it. And if he isn’t in control, it means somebody else is in on this. Somebody on the inside.”

“What makes you so goddamn certain?”

“Intuition. Knowledge of human nature.”

Lee laughed dismissively. “Well, I’ve got news for you. I already know all of it. It turns out that Al-Sharawi is a plant. He’s a CIA informant. He’s doing his fucking job, and if you will kindly get out of my way and let me do mine, there’s a chance he may be able to tell us what he knows.”

“CIA? Are you serious? This man is a fanatic. There’s no way he’s with the CIA.”

Lee started to raise his finger to drive home a point, but, just then, there was a sound of running footsteps and one of the ER doctors sped past the door, his long white coat trailing behind him. He was followed by a couple of nurses or techs in scrubs—also in one hell of a hurry. Harry noticed that the overhead pager was sounding:

“
Code blue, acute psychiatric unit. Code blue
.”

Lee gave Harry a startled look. “What is that? What is Code Blue?”

“Cardiac arrest,” said Harry.

Both men peered through the doorway. They saw a red crash cart being jammed through a crowd of onlookers at the entrance to the isolation suite.

“No! Jesus, no!” muttered Lee, as he dashed toward the scene.

Harry was on Lee’s heels. When he reached the crowd at the door, he had to strain on tiptoes to make out a team of ER personnel frantically giving CPR to someone on the floor. Pushing his way inside, he saw that it was Rahman who was at the center of the ruckus. He lay on his back, silent at last, his right arm still handcuffed to the wreckage of the bed. His face was obscured by an oxygen mask, but to Harry his skin looked bright ruddy red, not blue like most people in cardiac arrest.

“Pulse ox is ninety-eight, but I have no spontaneous respirations,” called out one of the nurses.

A young doctor with red hair was giving chest compressions. “Keep bagging him,” he shouted. “Can we crank up that oxygen?”

“It’s at ten liters.”

Another nurse was injecting something into an IV line. “Another two milligrams of epi going in,
now
.”

“What’s on the monitor?” asked the doctor.

“Nothing,” came a reply. “ECG’s still flat.”

For another two or three minutes, the young doctor continued pumping Rahman’s bare chest. There were beads of sweat on his forehead; as he bobbed up and down for the compressions, a shock of red hair would sweep across his brow, like a windshield wiper. He kept his eyes on the cardiac monitor.

Finally, the compressions slowed, and then ceased. Harry could hear sighs of resignation among the CPR team. The red-haired doctor stood up, looked at the monitor once more, and then at his watch. “It’s 2:47. I’m calling the code,” he announced.

Lee cornered Scopes, who had been watching on the sidelines. “Do you mind telling me what in God’s name happened here?”

Scopes shrugged. “He had something sewn into the sleeve of his shirt. When we were grappling with him, he ducked his head down and bit into it.”

Harry stepped forward and knelt beside the body. There was a yellow stain just above the hem of the right sleeve of Rahman’s soccer jersey. When Harry sniffed it, he smelled an overpowering scent of bitter almonds.

“Cyanide,” he declared.

“Right. Cyanide,” said Scopes. “That’s what we figured.”

Lee’s jaw hung askew. “That doesn’t make any sense. We were about to release him.”

“Obviously, he didn’t know that,” quipped Harry.

“Jesus H. Christ! I’m holding you responsible for this, Lewton. Thanks to you, we’ve lost a critical intelligence asset.”

“Some asset. Explain why a CIA informant would take poison.”

“What did you say to him?” Lee’s eyes were as big as Harry had ever seen them. “Goddamn it, why did he kill himself? What did you say?”

“Mr. Lewton! Mr. Lewton!” There came a woman’s voice, breathless as from a sprint down a long corridor, calling from the doorway. Harry looked beyond the crowd of cops and medics and saw Judy Wolper bobbing her head back and forth in an attempt to get his attention.

“What is it, Judy?” asked Harry, getting to his feet.

“We just got a call from the basement,” she shouted. “One of the electricians down there, Wayne Wilks. He’s … he’s…”

“He’s what, Judy?”

“He’s found the bomb.”

2:55
P.M.

Coming down the green-tiled corridor of Basement Level Two, Harry, Avery, Lee, and Scopes found a small group of men clustered in an alcove, where a service panel had been removed, leaving a three-foot-square opening in the wall. A tall, balding, gray-haired man in dark blue overalls, whom Harry recognized as Wayne Wilks, stepped forward to greet them.

“Mr. Lewton!”

“Wayne,” said Harry with a nod. “You want to show us what you found?”

“Here.” Wilks led them forward, as the others stepped out of the way. “This utility shaft was checked once, but nobody saw it. Then I jes’ got a feeling, and decided to look for myself.” Wilks shined a flashlight up through the opening. He and Harry craned their necks to get a look up at the shaft.

“I don’t see anything,” said Harry.

“Lookit that metal box.”

Harry looked again. About twelve feet up, there was a three-by-three-foot sheet-metal box protruding from a deep recess in one wall of the shaft. At first Harry had taken it for an electrical housing of some kind.

“I been up in this shaft not three weeks ago to make a splice, and that durned box weren’t there,” said Wilks. “It ain’t on any schematic. I’ll be hanged if it ain’t that bomb—an’ it’s a big ’un, too.”

Avery pushed his way to the shaft and looked for himself. “Aw, crap!” he said. “Can hardly get a midget up there.”

Lee and Scopes took their turns inspecting the mysterious box.

“Is it a bomb?” asked Lee.

“I’ll let you know in a minute,” said Avery. From his attaché case he took out a small gray electronic device, turned it on, and held it inside the darkened utility shaft. “Chemical spectrometer,” he explained. “It can pick up vapor residue from any of several dozen different compounds of interest.” In a moment, the spectrometer began to chirp and flash with an amber light. Avery pulled it out and read from the LED indicator. “
Cyclotrimethylene trinitramine
. It’s C4, all right. Concentration’s off the scale.”

Avery stepped away from the shaft and looked at Lee. “It’s our baby, no doubt about it. The outer casing encloses maybe eighteen to thirty cubic feet—big enough to contain your missing five hundred pounds of explosive. It’s bolted to the wall. I don’t see any wires going in or out, so it’s not clear how it’s set off. It could be a timer, or some form of radio or microwave detonation. All I know is, it’s gonna be real tough getting a man in there. And dangerous. There’s not enough room for a full bomb suit.”

“Do you think it’s booby-trapped?” asked Harry.

“Damn sure of it. This is a sophisticated device. Very clean. Very simple. Not a fucking clue as to how it’s put together inside. It’s got a creepy resemblance to something that showed up some years back in Lake Tahoe. That had eight different booby traps in it.”

“How did they disarm that one?”

“They didn’t. They just blew it up, along with pretty much all of Harvey’s Resort Hotel and Casino.”

“I’ll call headquarters,” said Lee.

“I’ll get my team down here on the double.” Avery turned to Wilks. “Excuse me, mister, but where are we? Which part of the hospital is this?”

“Basement Level Two, Tower C.”

“It’s the inner part of Tower C,” added Harry. “All three towers join together in a kind of backbone—a central service section that houses things like elevators, the inpatient pharmacy, X-ray satellite stations, computer labs, and so forth.”

“What’s on the other side of that wall where the bomb is?” asked Avery.

“Why, that’s nothin’ but solid concrete,” said Wilks.

“Concrete and steel,” said Harry. “It’s the foundation pediment for a steel support column that runs all the way to the top, twenty stories above us. Each of the towers has one. It’s how they’re tied to the backbone.”

Avery looked closely into Harry’s eyes, like a conspirator. “And if you wanted to bring down this whole complex—all of the towers, everything—could you think of a better place to do it?”

Harry thought of his mother, eighteen stories directly above him. “No. I could not,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

Avery put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Then, officially speaking, we’re up to our ears in doo-doo,” he said.

*   *   *

Shaken as she was when she left Rahman, Ali was determined to get the answer to two questions that had surfaced during the encounter.
Who had called Rahman from her telephone?
And,
How did Rahman know that she had left Kevin?
She did not have to think deeply about it, just as one did not have to think deeply about how apples came to lie at the foot of an apple tree.
Kevin
was the obvious answer. But why? Kevin and Rahman were such opposites that Ali could never imagine any cause that would bring the two together. But that made the mystery all the more disturbing.

Leaving the isolation room, she went directly to Kevin’s laboratory, on the first floor of the basement, in the central section between the three towers. She knocked, at first softly, then loudly. No answer. Had Kevin gone out? She could take advantage of that. She knew where he kept his personal notes. She could also look for his pink sheets—the reviews that gave a numbered score to grant applications at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Kevin had bragged about suddenly coming into funding for his research. If he were telling the truth, the pink sheets would not be hard to find.