Jack Ryan 2 - Patriot Games (45 page)

“Not till then?” Ryan's face twisted into an agonized mass. The fist tightened its grip yet again. She still might die . . .?

“Mr. Ryan,” Shapiro said slowly, “I know what you are going through. If it hadn't been for the helicopter bringing your little girl in, well, right now I'd be telling you that she had died. Another five minutes getting here -- maybe not that long -- and she would not have made it this far. That's how close it was. But she is alive now, and I promise you that we're doing our very best to keep her that way. And our best is the best there is. My team of doctors and nurses is the best of its kind in the world -- period. Nobody comes close. If there's a way, we'll find it.” And if there's not, he didn't say, we won't.

“Can I see them?”

“No.” Shapiro shook his head. “Right now both of them are in the CCRU -- the Critical Care Recovery Unit. We keep that as clean as an OR. The smallest infection can be lethal for a trauma patient. I'm sorry, but it would be too dangerous to them. My people are watching them constantly. A nurse -- an experienced trauma nurse -- is with each of them every second, with a team of doctors and nurses thirty feet away.”

“Okay.” He almost gasped the word. Ryan leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Eight more hours? But you have no choice. You have to wait. You have to do what they say. “Okay.”

Shapiro left and Jackson followed after him, catching him by the elevator.

“Doc, can't Jack see his little girl? She --”

“Not a chance.” Shapiro half fell against the wall and let out a long breath. “Look, right now the little girl -- what's her name anyway?”

“Sally.”

“Okay, right now she's in a bed, stark naked, with IV tubes running into both arms and one leg. Her head's partially shaved. She's wired up to a half-dozen monitors, and we have an Engstrom respirator breathing for her. Her legs are wrapped -- all you can see of her is one big bruise from her hips to the top of her head.” Shapiro looked down at the pilot. He was too tired to show any emotion. “Look, she might die. I don't think so, but there's no way we can be sure. With liver injuries, you can't tell until the blood-chemistry readings come in, you just can't. If she does die, would you want your friend to see her like that? Would you want him to remember her like that, for the rest of his life?”

“I guess not,” Jackson said quietly, surprised at how much he wanted this little girl to live. His wife could not have children, and somehow Sally had become like their own. “What are her chances?”

“I'm not a bookie, I don't quote odds. Numbers don't mean a thing in a case like this. Sorry, but either she makes it or she doesn't. Look, that wasn't a song and dance I gave -- Jack, you said? She could not be in a better place.” Shapiro's eyes focused on Jackson's chest. He jabbed a finger at the wings of gold. “You a pilot?”

“Yeah. Fighters.”

“Phantoms?”

“No, the F-14. Tomcat.”

“I fly.” Shapiro smiled. “I used to be a flight surgeon in the Air Force. Last year I got a sailplane. Nice and peaceful up there. When I can get away from this madhouse, I go up every time I can. No phones. No hassles. Just me and the clouds.” The doctor was not talking to Jackson so much as himself. Robby set his hand on the surgeon's arm.

“Doc, tell you what -- you save that little girl, and I'll get you a checkride in any bird you want. Ever been up in a T-38?”

“What's that?” Shapiro was too tired to remember that he'd seen them before.

“A spiffy little supersonic trainer. Two seats, dual controls, and she handles like a wet dream. I can disguise you as one of ours and get you up, no sweat. Ever been past mach-1?”

“No. Can you do some aerobatics?” Shapiro smiled like a tired little boy.

“Sure, Doc.” Jackson grinned, knowing that he could do maneuvers to make a quail lose its lunch.

“I'll take you up on that. We work the same way with every patient, but I'll take you up on that anyway. Keep an eye on your friend. He looks a little rocky. That's normal. This sort of thing can be harder on the family than it is on the victims. If he doesn't come around some, tell the receptionist. We have a staff psychiatrist who specializes in working with -- the other victims, he calls 'em.” Yet another new idea at Shock-Trauma was a specialist in helping people cope with the injuries to family and friends.

“Cathy's arm. She's an eye surgeon, lots of fine work, you know? You sure there's no problem with that?”

Shapiro shook his head. “No big deal. It was a clean break to the humerus. Must have been a jacketed slug. The bullet went in clean, went out clean. Pretty lucky, really.”

Robby's hand clamped shut on the doctor's arm as the elevator arrived. “Bullet?”

“Didn't I say that? God, I must be tireder than I thought. Yeah, it was a gunshot wound, but very clean. Hell, I wish they were all that clean. A nine-millimeter, maybe a thirty-eight, 'bout that size. I have to get back to work.” The doctor went into the elevator.

“Shit,” Jackson said to the wall. He turned when he heard a man with an English accent -- two of them, it turned out -- whom the receptionist directed to the waiting room. Robby followed them in.

The taller one approached Ryan and said, “Sir John?”

Ryan looked up. Sir John? Robby thought. The Brit drew himself to attention and went on briskly.

“My name is Geoffrey Bennett. I am Charge d'Affaires at the British Embassy.” He produced an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Ryan. “I am directed by Her Majesty to deliver this personally into your hand and to await your reply.”

Jack blinked his eyes a few times, then tore open the envelope and extracted a yellow message form. The cable was brief, kind, and to the point. What time is it over there? Ryan wondered. Two in the morning? Three? Something like that. That meant that she'd been awakened with the news, probably, and cared enough to send a personal message. And was waiting for a reply.

How about that.

Ryan closed his eyes and told himself that it was time to return to the world of the living. Too drained for the tears he needed to shed, he swallowed a few times and rubbed his hands across his face before standing.

“Please tell Her Majesty that I am most grateful for her concern. My wife is expected to recover fully, but my daughter is in critical condition and we will have no definitive word on her for another eight or nine hours. Please tell Her Majesty that . . . that I am deeply touched by her concern, and that all of us value her friendship very highly indeed.”

“Thank you, Sir John.” Bennett made some notes. “I will cable your reply immediately. If you have no objection, I will leave a member of the embassy staff here with you.” Jack nodded, puzzled, as Bennett made his exit.

Robby took all this in with a raised eyebrow and a dozen unasked questions. Who was this guy? He introduced himself as Edward Wayson, and took a seat in the corner facing the doorway. He looked over at Jackson. Their eyes met briefly and each man evaluated the other. Wayson had cool, detached eyes, and a wispy smile at the corners of his mouth. Robby gave him a closer look. There was a slight bulge under his left arm. Wayson affected to read a paperback novel, which he held in his left hand, but his eyes kept flickering to the door every few seconds, and his right hand stayed free in his lap. He caught Jackson's glance and nodded. So, Robby concluded, a spook, or at least a security officer. So that's what this is all about. The realization came as a blast of cold air. The pilot's hands flexed as he considered the type of person who would deliberately attempt to murder a woman and her child.

Five minutes later three State Police officers made their belated arrival. They talked to Ryan for ten minutes. Jackson watched with interest and saw his friend's face go pale with anger as he stammered answers to numerous questions. Wayson didn't look but heard it all.

“You were right, Jimmy,” Murray said. He was standing at the window, watching the early morning traffic negotiate the corner of Broadway and Victoria.

“Paddy O'Neil in Boston likes to say what wonderful chaps Sinn Fein are,” Owens said speculatively. “And our friend O'Donnell decides to embarrass them. We could not have known, Dan. A possibility of a suspicion is not evidence and you know it. There was no basis in fact for giving them a more serious warning than what you did. And you did warn them, Dan.”

“She's a pretty little girl. Gave me a hug and a kiss before they flew home.” Murray looked at his watch again and subtracted five hours. “Jimmy, there are times . . . Fifteen years ago we arrested this -- this person who went after kids, little boys. I interrogated him. Sang like a canary, he couldn't be happier with himself. He copped to six cases, gave me all the details with a big shit-eatin' grin. It was right after the Supreme Court struck down all the death-penalty laws, so he knew that he'd live to a ripe old age. Do you know how close I came to --” He stopped for a moment before going on. “Sometimes we're too damned civilized.”

“The alternative, Dan, is to become like them.”

“I know that's true; Jimmy, but I just don't like it right now.”

When Barry Shapiro next checked his watch it was five in the morning. No wonder I feel so tired, he thought. Twenty hours on duty. I'm too old for this. He was senior staff. He was supposed to know better.

The first sign was staying on duty too long, taking on too much personal responsibility, taking too keen an interest in patients who in the final analysis were nothing more or less than bruised and broken pieces of meat. Some of them died. No matter how great his skill, how refined his technique, how determined the efforts of his team, some would always die. And when you got this tired, you couldn't sleep. Their injuries -- and worse, their faces -- were too fresh in your memory, too haunting to go away. Doctors need sleep more than most men. Persistent loss of sleep was the last and most dangerous warning. That was when you had to leave -- or risk a breakdown, as had happened all too often to the Shock-Trauma staffers.

It was their grimmest institutional joke: how their patients arrived with broken bodies and mostly went home whole -- but the staff doctors and nurses who came in with the greatest energy and highest personal ideals would so often leave broken in spirit. It was the ultimate irony of his profession that success would engender the expectation of still greater success; that failure in this most demanding of medical disciplines could leave almost as much damage on the practitioner as the patient. Shapiro was cynic enough to see the humor of it.

The surgeon reread the printout that the blood-analyzer unit had spat out a minute before, and handed it back to the nurse practitioner. She attached it to the child's chart, then sat back down, stroking her dirty hair outside the oxygen mask.

“Her father is downstairs. Get relief here and go down and tell him. I'm going upstairs for a smoke.” Shapiro left the CCRU and got his overcoat, fishing in his pockets for his cigarettes.

He wandered down the hall to the fire stairs, then climbed slowly up the six flights to the roof. God, he thought. Dear God, I'm tired. The roof was flat, covered with tar and gravel, spotted here and there with the UHF antennas for the center's SYSCOM communications net, and a few air-conditioning condensers. Shapiro lit a cigarette in the lee of the stairway tower, cursing himself for his inability to break the noxious habit. He rationalized that, unlike most of his colleagues, he never saw the degenerative effects of smoking. Most of his patients were too young for chronic diseases. Their injuries resulted from the miracles of a technical society: automobiles, motorcycles, firearms, and industrial machinery.

Shapiro walked to the edge of the roof, rested his foot on the parapet as though on a bar rail, and blew smoke into the early-morning air. It wafted away to appear and disappear as a gentle morning breeze carried it past the rooftop lights. The doctor stretched his tired arms and neck. The night's rain had washed the sky clean of its normal pollution, and he could see stars overhead in the pre-dawn darkness.

Shapiro's curious accent resulted from his background. His early childhood had been spent in the Williamsburg section of New York, the son of a rabbi who had taken his family to South Carolina. Barry had had good private schooling there, but emerged from it with a mixture of Southern drawl and New York quip. It was further damaged by a prairie twang acquired during his medical training at Baylor University in Texas. His father was a distinguished man of letters in his own right, a frequent lecturer at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. An expert in 19th-century American literature, Rabbi Shapiro's specialty was the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Barry Shapiro loathed Poe. A scribbler of death and perversity, the surgeon called him whenever the subject came up, and he'd been surprised to learn that Poe had died in Baltimore long before, after falling asleep, drunk, in a gutter; and that Poe's home was only a few blocks from the University Hospital complex, a demi-shrine for the local literati.

It seemed to the surgeon that everything about Poe was dark and twisted, always expecting the inevitability of death -- violent, untimely death, Shapiro's own very personal enemy. He had come to think of Poe as the embodiment of that enemy, sometimes beaten, sometimes not. It was not something he talked about to the staff psychiatrist, who also kept a close eye on the hospital staff -- but now, alone, he looked north to the Poe house.

“You son of a bitch,” he whispered. To himself. To Poe. To no one. “You son of a bitch! Not this time -- you don't get this one! This one goes home.” He flicked the cigarette away and watched the point of orange light fall all the way to the shining, empty street. He turned back to the stairs. It was time to get some sleep.

Like most professional officers, Lieutenant Commander Robby Jackson had little use for the press. The irony of it was that Jack had tried many times to tell him that his outlook was wrong, that the press was as important to the preservation of American democracy as the Navy was. Now, as he watched, reporters were hounding his friend with questions that alternated between totally inane and intrusively personal. Why did everyone need to know how Jack felt about his daughter's condition? What would any normal person feel about having his child hovering near death -- did they need such feelings explained? How was Jack supposed to know who'd done the shooting -- if the police didn't know, how could he?