Critical Judgment (1996) (43 page)

Abby’s pulse was racing as she pulled herself out of the cylinder and turned on the overheads. There were eight minutes left by her watch. She took a step back and ran her gaze around the margin of the opening. At the twelve o’clock position there was a small fan that was used, she assumed, to keep air circulating over the patient during the test. At three o’clock there was a clear Plexiglas disc attached to the housing by a rivet and hinge in such a way that it could be swung over the opening and fixed in place, effectively sealing the cylinder at that end. Abby went around and checked the other end. There was no similar piece there. Was that a standard part of the equipment?

Six minutes.

Abby hurried to the phone on the wall by the door and called Lew.

“Is the X-ray tech still there?” she asked.

“He’s busy conjugating the verb
ir. ‘
To go.’ ”

“Well,
menos prisa, por favor.”

“Go slow. Where did you learn—?”

“Lew, I’ve found something, but I need more time.”

“Tell me.”

“Can you see Hector right now? We can’t let him come back here yet.”

“He’s right over there at the nurses’ station, wondering how so many people in the world who are not as smart as he is can speak Spanish so well. But a guy’s just been brought in with a fractured hand from punching a tree instead of his girlfriend. Hector knows him and knows he’s got work to do.”

“Fifteen minutes. Can you give me that much?”

“What have you found?”

“Lew, there are tiny holes inside the cylinder just above where the patient’s nose and mouth would be. Do you know if they’re supposed to be there?”

“No idea.”

“There’s more. There’s a Plexiglas plate that can be swung over the opening at that end, sealing it off and creating an enclosed space.”

“But what for?”

“I don’t know. Listen, Lew, I need to look some more, and I want to call the radiology resident on duty at St. John’s. Can you give me fifteen minutes?”

“I can try. Maybe I’ll have him conjugate
hacer el amor.”

“ ‘To make love.’ From what I know of Hector, that might do it. I’m at extension three-three-eight-four. Call if you lose him. I’m going to check with St. John’s, then I’m going to try to figure out what comes out of those little holes.”

“Just be careful and keep me informed. Kelly underestimated those people.”

“So did I.”

Abby hung up, reset her watch for a thirteen-minute countdown, and used the switchboard operator to call St. John’s. It took just a one-minute conversation for her to confirm what she intuitively suspected: there are no holes inside the standard MRI, and no technical reason ever to close off one end of the cylinder.

 … It even had a weird taste.…

She returned to the massive housing and first examined the cables and tubes making up the hydraulic system for the sled, then the base of the machine. Nothing.

Nine minutes.

Feeling just a bit panicky from the press of time, she stepped back again, searching for something, anything, that looked out of place. It was fully half a minute before she realized she had not inspected the top of the unit. She pulled over a wooden straight-backed chair and stood on it. The missing piece was there—a small bundle of clear plastic tubes, each slightly smaller than IV tubing, rising from the floor next to the hydraulics, and running around the outside of the housing to a spot just above the ventilation fan. From there the bundle dropped into the machine through a black-rubber gasket.

Seven minutes.

Abby traced the bundle of tubes back down to the floor at the base of the unit, where they disappeared into a white enamel shield. Using the penlight, she tried peering down behind the shield. As far as she could tell, the tubes seemed to come right out of the tiled floor. Lying prone on the floor and using the penlight for an up-close examination, she studied the foot-square beige tiles, and the gray grout between them.

Six minutes.

Five.

Just as she was about to give up, she saw it—a thin space, less than a millimeter, through the grout bordering a two-foot square of tile. It was virtually invisible except at almost microscopic range and had to be a trapdoor of some sort. At that moment the wall phone began ringing. Abby sprang up and dashed to it.

“Hector’s just gotten a call,” Lew said. “One of the floors is sending someone down for an emergency belly film. He’s meeting them in two minutes.”

“Damn!”

“I really can’t keep him here without having it look terribly suspicious.”

“Lew, I’ve found it! The MRI machine is rigged to function as some sort of inhalation chamber. That was why Claire experienced what she did. The gas, whatever it is, comes up through the floor in six small tubes and enters the cylinder at the top, right by those little ports I told you about. If that Plexiglas panel is in place, it would be possible to deliver a very closely controlled dose.”

“An inhalation chamber. God, as if that thing didn’t feel enough like being pushed into a tomb.”

“There’s more. I traced the tubes down, and they seem to go straight into the floor. Lew, I think there’s a trapdoor in the tile right near where they go in. I want to find a way to open it.”

“What about Hector?”

“If all he’s doing is a standard set of abdominal films, there’s no reason why he should come in here. I’m going to chance it.”

“I don’t know if that’s wise.”

“I’ll be back in the ER in ten minutes.”

“Just—”

“I know. I know. It seems that ‘be careful’ is all you’ve been saying to me lately.”

“I’m crazy about you. How’s that?”

“That’s much better,” she said. “I’ll see you in ten.”

She went out and closed the curtain in the control room. Next she returned and checked the walls in the main room for any switch that might unlock the panel in the floor. Then she stopped, calmed herself, and struggled to overcome her limited mechanical aptitude. She began by reasoning the situation out piece by piece, the way she did in the ER when her first rapid-fire treatment of a crisis failed to work. Whatever was going on in the MRI scanner, it was unlikely that more than a very few people were in on it. Dozens of explanations could be given to any technician or physician who questioned
the tubes or the Plexiglas. And the patients, many of whom wore coverings on their eyes to help them relax, were unlikely even to notice the pores in the cylinder, or to think them abnormal. A switch on the wall would be too prone to being thrown by mistake. Instead, she concluded, it had to be a lever, most likely concealed beneath the electromagnet housing itself. Something mechanical, not electric.

Abby got down on her hands and knees once again, feeling up underneath the cylinder where the track came out. It took several careful minutes, but finally her hand closed on a smooth curved handle hidden high up behind the housing, well away from any place it could be accidentally pulled. It was metal of some sort, although if so, it certainly had to be nonferromagnetic. She composed herself with a deep breath, curled her fingers around the handle, and pulled. With a soft pop the latch released. The four-tile segment of floor opened half an inch at one side. Abby’s pulse was hammering again as she crawled over, lifted the hatch, and peered inside. Below her was a ladder, set in concrete, dropping six feet or so to the start of a concrete tunnel. The narrow plastic tubes, extending through the tunnel wall, appeared to run along the length of ceiling. The floor of the tunnel was slatted wood, like the floor of a sauna.

It took a few seconds for Abby to re-create the orientation of the hospital and the radiology suite and to get her bearings. But when she did, she became certain of what she already suspected—the tunnel was headed straight toward the Colstar cliff. From outside the unit, voices became audible. People were closer than she would have expected given the room where Hector would have been working. She hurried across and killed the overhead lights. Then she returned to the trapdoor, using the penlight. Suddenly there was a scraping, as if someone’s shoe had brushed against the hallway door.

Quickly, she dropped onto the ladder and lowered herself into the tunnel. Then she checked that she could
open the hatch from underneath before pulling it down over her.

She crouched at the base of the ladder and waited. A minute passed. Two. There was no sound from above. The tunnel was almost exactly her height—perhaps an inch or so more. The air was stagnant and dusty, the darkness total. Abby shined the penlight into the blackness. It illuminated a few feet, no more. Again she listened for sounds from above. Again there was nothing.

She had come too far, learned too much, to turn back now. Moving inches at a time, hunching her shoulders, and keeping the weak light trained on the floorboards, she took her first tentative steps toward what she knew was the man-made cavern within the Colstar cliff.

T
he concrete tunnel sloped downward and seemed to make a gradual bend to the right. As she moved through it, Abby tried to estimate where she might be relative to what she remembered of the terrain and the layout of PRH. Under the service parking lot behind the hospital.… Under the long gravel-and-dirt lot, staked out with flag sticks for some future addition.… Under the high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.… Under the broad meadow of boulders, jagged rock, and wildflowers that led to the Colstar cliff.… And, finally, somewhere near or under the cliff itself.

Progress was slow. There was a row of bare incandescent lightbulbs, set about ten feet apart along the center of the ceiling, but none of them was lit. Abby cursed herself for not thinking to look for a switch somewhere around the ladder, although it was doubtful she would have felt safe turning it on. Running parallel to the row of lights was the bundle of six narrow plastic tubes, each color-coded by bands of tape spaced along its length: yellow, red, blue, green, pink, and black.

The small penlight succeeded a little in piercing the dark, but the blackness was consuming when Abby turned it off. Gradually, the damp, musty taste to the air
began to subside. Her estimate put her well beyond the base of the Colstar cliff now, but there was absolutely no way to know her position with any certainty. From somewhere up ahead, she could feel a faint breeze and hear the low hum of air-conditioning. Then, as she continued the gentle curve to the right, she saw a faint light. Her heart was pounding in her throat as she moved forward. Twice she had to stop and brace herself against the wall just to allow her pulse to slow down. With each step the light grew larger and brighter, until finally she could make out the outlines of a doorway. Her best guess was that she had traveled a quarter of a mile from the hospital. Maybe more.

Except for the faint hum of the air-conditioning unit, the silence was absolute. Abby turned off the penlight and inched her way along the wall. Her fight and flight reflexes were turned up to the maximum, but she knew that nothing was going to override her anger and her overwhelming curiosity. The light flowing through the doorway was fluorescent. As she moved to the end of the passageway, she realized that it was coming from around the side of a whitewashed concrete wall twenty feet away. She stepped around the doorway and was standing within a dimly lit space that rose into the rock as far as she could see. At the center of the space was an elevator, enclosed in a concrete shaft. A metal staircase wound around it like a serpent. At the base of the stairs, riveted to the stone wall, was a professionally painted sign:

Beside the sign, encased in glass, were the fire alarm and the manual lever controlling the emergency sprinkler system. In a rack on the floor were half a dozen hand-held state-of-the-art fire extinguishers. And hanging on the wall were three rubberized exposure suits and an equal number of gas masks.

Abby flattened herself against the wall and listened for any hint that others were around. All was quiet. From her hours of reviewing Kelly’s research in the registry of deeds office and the library, she knew exactly where she was—at the bottom of the main shaft of the Patience Mine. Unless she was badly off base, the emergency exits referred to on the sign were two of the three old ventilation shafts that were so carefully camouflaged on the rock face.

Grateful that she was wearing sneakers, Abby stepped cautiously onto the first metal step, waited there a few seconds, then quietly made her way upward. Lighting along the rock wall beside the staircase was minimal—widely spaced low-wattage incandescent bulbs covered by opaque plastic clip-on shades. She could look over the black iron-pipe railing and see straight down alongside the concrete elevator shaft. The first ventilation tunnel was twenty-five feet up the rock wall, exactly where she anticipated. However, the opening was sealed with a locked accordion-type metal gate. Just beyond the gate were tools, bags of concrete, and hand-held drilling equipment indicating that the shaft was undergoing some sort of repair.

USE 2ND EMERGENCY EXIT, the sign wired to the gate read. Abby tiptoed up to the next landing and was now looking a dizzying fifty feet straight down along the shaft. To her right was the emergency-escape passageway, beginning with an opening in the rock similar to the one at the end of the tunnel from the hospital. To her left were a concrete landing and a short flight of stairs going up. She tried the stairs first. At the top of the flight was the pitch-black space Abby knew from
A Brief
History of the Patience Mine
. Although the soft glow from the stairway didn’t allow her to see beyond ten or twelve feet, she strongly sensed that the entire cavernous area, called “The Upper Dig” in the monograph, was empty. According to the book, she was now about forty feet below the plant and sixty feet or so above “The Lower Dig.”