Patient (21 page)

“But what if he—”

“Just call him!”

Jessie snatched up the phone and was patched through to the hospital CEO’s office immediately. Malloche watched and listened intently until she set the receiver down.

“Ten minutes,” she said.

Chapter 28

RICHARD MARCUS, ROTUND, BALDING, AND NOT much taller than Jessie, had been the CEO of Eastern Mass Medical Center for six years. A physician with an MBA, he was a decent and intelligent man whom Jessie had always liked and respected. Under his guidance, the hospital had evolved from mediocrity to a place of rising prestige and public confidence. His main failing had always seemed to Jessie to be that he would rather listen to himself than to others. But unlike with Carl Gilbride, who suffered from the same malady, persistence usually succeeded in getting Marcus’s attention.

Marcus was waiting outside the pathology office when the elevator doors opened and Jessie emerged with Malloche and Derrick. Both of her companions, she knew, carried weapons—Malloche’s concealed beneath his sports coat, and Derrick’s beneath a black wind breaker with an elastic waist. Marcus had met with Eastman Tolliver previously and recognized him immediately.

“Mr. Tolliver,” he said heartily, “good to see you again.”

Malloche simply grinned and took Marcus’s proffered hand. Marcus looked as if he expected an introduction to Derrick, but when none was forthcoming, he extended his hand and introduced himself. The terrorist held his grip as briefly as possible and said nothing. Nonplussed, Marcus turned to Jessie inquiringly.

“Richard,” she said, “I think we should go down the hallway, to where we can talk.”

Marcus scanned from one to another of the three and then did as she had requested.

“So, what’s this all about?” he asked.

Malloche nodded that Jessie could do the honors. “Well, Richard,” she said, “it’s all about that this man is not Eastman Tolliver.”

“But—”

“His name is Claude Malloche. Have you heard of him?”

“No, I haven’t, but—”

“Mr. Malloche kills people for a living, Richard. And right now he and his people are holding all the patients and staff on Surgical Seven hostage. The doors to the neurosurgical ward are closed off and wired with explosives. The elevators can’t be taken to the floor unless Mr. Malloche brings one there. The reason for all this is that Malloche has a brain tumor that he wants me to operate on. Apparently the FBI knew he was sick, and after all the publicity over Marci Sheprow, they thought he might be coming here. They had an agent on Surgical Seven working undercover as a volunteer. Malloche just shot her to death. Until he has recovered successfully from his surgery, he intends to keep everyone up there prisoner.” The color had drained from Richard Marcus’s face. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the sheen of sweat that had materialized across his forehead and upper lip.

“I ... I don’t believe this,” he managed.

“Believe it, Dr. Marcus,” Malloche said. “It is very important that you believe it. I had hoped to have my surgery and return to my home without incident. Fortunately, we were prepared for other possibilities. But we need your help.”

“My help?”

“Would you please take us over to the microbiology laboratory.”

Marcus hesitated.

“Richard, please,” Jessie said. “They’re both armed. Just do as he says. Malloche, please don’t hurt anyone.”

The killer looked at her placidly and gestured Marcus toward the lab. They stopped outside the door—heavy oak with a rubber seal around it. A pane of glass filled the upper half, with MICROBIOLOGY stenciled across it in gold. The room beyond the door was largely Corian counters, sophisticated glassware, stainless steel refrigeration units, and incubators. Two men and two women in lab coats were busily working with agar culture dishes, viral tissue culture bottles, and microscopes.

Jessie knew one of the four, Rachel Sheridan, fairly well from a ski trip to New Hampshire and some other hospital-sponsored social activities. Rachel, divorced with a school-aged daughter, was athletic, fun-loving, and popular. Sound from the room was somewhat muffled by the door and seal, but Jessie could still make out that one of the men—she thought his name might be Ron—was asking for help identifying the microorganism beneath his scope. Music, maybe Mozart, was playing in the background.

Viewed this way, Jessie almost felt as if she were watching the four technicians on television.
Almost
. A dreadful apprehension was building in her gut. Malloche looked chillingly calm, almost dreamy. His lips bowed in a half-smile, and he nodded to Derrick, who extracted a small transmitter from his jacket pocket and pulled up the antenna.

“NO!”

Before Jessie could even scream the word, Derrick depressed a button on the face of the transmitter. From inside the room, they heard a muffled pop and the sound of breaking glass. A small puff of grayish smoke billowed up from beneath a counter. The technicians spun toward the noise. Jessie cried out and lunged for the door, but Malloche grabbed her lab coat and scrub shirt firmly at the neck and pulled her back.

“Opening that door at this moment would be a foolish mistake,” he said.

“Oh, God,” Jessie murmured.

Beyond the glass, a hideous dance of death had already begun. Rachel Sheridan, standing closest to the gas, lurched backward as if she’d been kicked in the chest by a mule. At almost the same instant, she began retching violently, setting the counter awash in vomit and splattering two of the others. Her head had twisted abnormally to one side. Her face, frighteningly contorted, had turned the color of gentian violet.

Seconds later, two of the others were staggering about as well, vomiting uncontrollably with projectile force, and sending glasswork, incubators, and stacks of culture dishes crashing to the floor as they thrashed about. The grotesque discoloration of their faces and almost inhuman torsion of their necks mimicked Rachel’s. The three of them were collapsing to the floor when the fourth, perhaps having held her breath, began to twitch and clutch at her belly. As she stumbled to one side, she looked through the glass and saw the group standing there, transfixed. With overwhelming panic distorting her face, she stretched an unsteady, clawed hand in their direction.

Help me!
came her silent scream.
Help me
.

Then she, too, began retching.

In less than two nightmarish minutes it was over. The four technicians, grotesquely discolored, soaked in vomit, lay dead on the floor, limbs splayed, faces violet, necks twisted almost ninety degrees to one side.

Richard Marcus turned away and braced himself against a wall. Jessie, who had been standing shoulder to shoulder with him, also looked away.

“You monster,” she said, her back still to Malloche. “You fucking monster!”

She whirled and threw a closed-fisted punch at his face. Malloche caught her fist as calmly as if it were a tennis ball she had lobbed to him, and squeezed it just hard enough to warn against any repeat.

“Easy, now,” he said. “We don’t want anything happening to that hand of yours. Perhaps we’d better head back up to Surgical Seven before someone has the misfortune to come along and see us. With the ventilating hoods in that room, the gas should be dissipated in just a minute or two. Come along.”

Jessie supported Richard Marcus, who was ghastly pale and perspiring heavily. Once in the elevator, she lowered him to the floor. Gradually, his color began to return. Derrick made a call on a two-way radio, and they headed upward. Somewhere between the third and fourth floors, Malloche threw the emergency switch, stopping the car. “I’m sorry if our little demonstration upset you both. But I need your complete cooperation as well as your confidence that my threats are not idle ones. Dr. Marcus, do you hear me?”

“I ... I hear you.”

“Then look at me, please. You have a very important role to play in all of this, and you have precious little time to prepare.”

Marcus struggled to his feet.

“Bastard,” he muttered.

“There, that’s much better,” Malloche said. “The gas whose power you just witnessed is called soman. You may have heard of it as GD, currently the most virulent neurotoxin known to man—far more potent than sarin. Some friends of ours in Baghdad have made a generous supply available to us. But I assure you that, depending on placement, population density, and the prevailing wind, a generous supply of soman is not needed to cause a massive amount of damage. We have placed radio-detonated vials, much larger than the one whose effects you just witnessed, in well-camouflaged spots in heavily trafficked areas throughout the city. If anything should happen to prevent my surgery, or if I should not wake up promptly after leaving the operating room, not only will all those on Surgical Seven pay the price, but a significant proportion of the city as well. Is that clear? ... Dr. Marcus?”

“Oh, God. Yes, it’s clear, it’s clear.”

“I will be cured of this tumor in my head, and I will make it safely out of the hospital. Is that clear, Dr. Copeland?”

Jessie sighed.

“Clear,” she said.

“Okay. I’m glad we’re on the same page. Now, Dr. Marcus, you have about two days to keep the public at bay, maybe three, depending on my recovery time. In the process of so doing, you will save the lives of a great many people. First, I want you to empty the pathology department and seal it off. Then announce to the media that there has been a biological disaster here at the hospital—a deadly viral exposure of some as yet unknown sort, requiring that the microbiology lab and the neurosurgical service on Surgical Seven be sealed off. Inform the public that the rest of the hospital is perfectly safe, but as a precaution it is being closed to all but essential personnel. All other hospital employees should be told to stay away until the crisis has passed. Go to minimal staffing. Double or triple all pay for those who come in. Discharge as many patients as possible at once. Chain off all entryways except through the main lobby. Divert all emergencies to other hospitals. Clear?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you are to do whatever is necessary to muddle efforts to get to the bottom of the problem. If one agency wants to investigate, tell them another already is. Create as much confusion and dissension as you can. Whatever you need to do to buy time you must do. Derrick, here, or one of my other people, will be with you at all times seeing to it that you perform the way I know you’re capable of. Another of my people will be out in the city, connected to us by radio, and never far from the vials of soman. Please do not do anything that will force me to conduct another, more extensive demonstration of its virulence.”

“I—I’ll try my best,” Marcus replied.

Malloche threw the switch and returned Marcus and Derrick to the basement. Then he took Jessie back up to Surgical Seven.

“Dr. Copeland, I have decided that my surgery will take place tomorrow afternoon no matter what. Offer whatever assurances and financial inducements necessary to assemble the essential operating room personnel. Fail in this regard, and I promise you a quite sizable group of people will suddenly be on intimate terms with soman.”

“I don’t see how—”

“Dr. Copeland, my patience is thin, and my demands are not up for debate. Now mobilize whomever you have to and get this goddamn tumor out of my brain.”

Chapter 29

OVER THE SEVENTEEN YEARS SINCE THE CIA HAD recruited him, Alex Bishop had become used to dealing with informants. Most were no less criminal than those on whom they were informing. Jorge Cardoza was no different. A scarred, rodent-faced little man, he had made it up the ranks in Claude Malloche’s organization simply because he was quite proficient at the one skill Malloche demanded—killing.

As Alex inched back from the airport into Boston through the Sumner Tunnel, he assessed the man who he knew was responsible for the deaths of many. Cardoza, dressed in worn jeans and a stained polo shirt, sat slumped in the passenger seat, head pressed against the side window, staring out at the exhaust-stained concrete and tile. He had traded information on Malloche for his own freedom and had paid dearly for that decision. Now, with his wife and child dead, and a hefty price on his head throughout Malloche’s organization, information was all that was keeping him from being thrown to the wolves. With no money and no support whatsoever as far as Alex could tell, he was attempting to start his life over again in Uruguay—the one place outside of Europe where he had relatives.

“You promise I can have my money and my plane tickets out of here as soon as I have done what you want?” Cardoza asked in Spanish.

“You identify this body and I will keep my side of the bargain,” Alex replied, his Castilian Spanish fluent and with little accent.

“What if the man you have is not Malloche?”

“Then I will have made a very serious misjudgment, and you will still be free to go.”

“With the money.”

“Yes.”

“And the tickets.”

“Yes. But I am certain the man I have
is
Malloche.”

Alex used his cell phone to call the FBI answering service that was functioning essentially as his office. No word from Jessie, no word from Lisa Brandon. Both were good signs. Arlette Malloche was still at Eastern Mass Medical, apparently willing to accept as necessary the delays in allowing her to claim her husband’s body. It would not be long now. Once Malloche was positively identified, he was sure the Boston FBI would cooperate fully and move in on Arlette and her people.

“It has been hard on me,” Cardoza said.

“I know, I know.”

Ratting on your cohorts often is.

“Malloche has forced me to do this.”

“Yes, he has.”

“You are a good man, Bishop.”

“That means a lot coming from you, Jorge.”

The Bowker and Hammersmith Funeral Parlor, in the city’s Dorchester section, was straight out of
The Twilight Zone
—weathered sign, gray, peeling clapboard siding, front steps that creaked and groaned on the way up to a porch that couldn’t possibly have supported an oak casket and full complement of pallbearers.

“I need a funeral parlor that will rent me a hearse and store a body, and not ask any questions,” Alex had asked his FBI contact.

Bowker and Hammersmith’s number was given to him without hesitation.

Alex pulled the rental car into the driveway on the side and motioned Cardoza to bring along his luggage—a single black nylon gym bag, small enough to carry onto the plane. They entered the funeral parlor through a service door and went directly to the basement room that held the refrigerated walk-in storage unit.

The man Alex had dealt with at the funeral home had identified himself as Richard Jones. He had gladly taken five hundred dollars, along with another thousand that would be returned when the hearse was. Now, as Jones put it, he was out of the loop and would be gone until the body had been identified and someone from the coroner’s office had come by to pick it up.

Alex flipped on the light and directed Cardoza to wait while he went to get Malloche.

This is it
, he was thinking.
Five years
.

He wheeled out the body and pulled the sheet down to the nipples. The lips had pulled back in a gaping, toothy rictus so that it looked as if Malloche were grinning at him. Unsettling.

Jorge Cardoza approached the corpse cautiously, then bent over and studied the face.

“You have my money and my ticket?” he asked.

“Right here.” Alex patted his pocket.

“And I get them no matter what?”

“No matter what.” Alex felt suddenly cold. There was no reason for Cardoza to be stalling like this unless—

“It’s not him.”

“What?”

“I don’t know who this is, but it is not Claude Malloche.”

Alex braced himself on the stretcher and stared down at the corpse.

“Could he have had plastic surgery?”

“I saw him just three or four months ago,” Cardoza replied. “There is no resemblance.”

Alex grabbed the man by his shirt and pulled him up onto his tiptoes.

“Look at me, Jorge! Look me in the eyes and say this isn’t Malloche!”

“Bishop, I want the man to be dead as much as you do. He killed my wife and child, and he wants to kill me! But this is not Malloche.”

Slowly, Alex released his grip.

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “I ... I was so certain. What about Arlette? Have you ever seen her?”

Cardoza shook his head.

“I only know that she is said to be a very beautiful woman,” he said. “Now, please. ...”

Bishop replaced the sheet, wheeled Rolf Hermann’s body back into the refrigerator, and closed the door. There was no sense trying to keep Cardoza around to identify a man who might already be back in Europe after having been operated on at some other medical center. He had lost, and that was that. With luck, Malloche would die from his goddamn tumor. But it was doubtful Alex Bishop would ever hear about it.

Numbly, he walked the Spaniard back to the car, gave him his tickets and money, and dropped him off at a T station.