The Timer Game (41 page)

Mac swallowed, putting down the empty cooler. “Don Jose.”

The old man raised a yellowed hand corded with veins. “Acceptance of the natural order of things. That is the Yaqui way.”

This from an eighty-year-old man who had just hefted his knife and sailed it into the throat of a woman brandishing a gun, slicing her throat and killing her.

Don Jose smiled slightly, as if reading Mac’s thoughts. “Sometimes the natural order needs assistance from unnatural quarters.”

He cocked his head as if listening to a sound only he could hear. His old eyes stared across the shower stalls and sinks, the damaged locker gaping open, and settled his gaze on the still body of the beautiful woman dead at his feet.

“It has begun.” He shuffled over to Lee’s body, crouched down, and retrieved his knife.

And still Mac needed to be sure. “You know there’s no heart for your granddaughter.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that by not getting one, she’s probably going to die.”

“It comes for us all, Mac McGuire. Go swiftly. Or it may today find you.”

“Thank you,” Mac whispered.

He bent and clumsily lifted Lee to his shoulder. He ran.

____

“Five, Grace. Don’t make me clamp you in these ankle cuffs. The arm restraints should be sufficient. I want you in this seat now.”

He turned slightly to emphasize his point,
this
chair, and
now means now,
and in that brief moment, Grace saw her chance and turned toward the dress. It gusted and she shoved her hand into the gap left by the neck hole, found the metal nozzle expelling hot breaths of air. It was a small balloon, pink, curled in the Velcro pocket for days. She couldn’t mess up; couldn’t poke a hole. She lipped it over the nozzle and slid it down, anchoring it. It bubbled with air.

A sleight of hand. Look this way. While I do this. She stepped in front and reached for the zipper on her pants. Her mouth curved into a gargoyle smile. The sound of the bellows changed; blowing into a contained space.

A contained latex space.

“What are you doing?”

She leaned against the rack for support. Her legs trembled. Inside the dress, the pink balloon expanded.

“Isn’t this what you want? What you’ve always wanted?”

Anger darkened his features. He bridged the distance between them in three steps and grabbed her arms. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but you’re done.”

He was dragging her toward the chair. The balloon bulged under the dress, and suddenly there was one huge breast and one sagging one, and Warren flicked a glance toward the dress and frowned. He pushed her aside and ripped the dress open. It was big now, a pink balloon unnaturally expanded past breaking point, air wheezing and inflating it with each push. A small bubble filmed the balloon, milky white, the weak spot.

Warren’s eyes changed. “No. You didn’t.”

He jumped backward, trying to get away, tripped, and toppled the Katie exhibit, losing his grip on the gun. Grace kicked it out of reach as he grabbed his throat, eyes wild.

He was wheezing. “My shot. My epinephrine. On the console. Next to the phone.”

Grace retrieved the gun and pointed it at him. On the console, the phone rang.

“That’s going to be Belikond,” she said calmly. The gun shivered in her hands and she clamped her hands around it and it stopped moving.

The balloon exploded.

A loud, muffled
whump.

Latex shredded the air.

“No!” He dropped to his knees, his face bright red. Tears streamed. He was making choking sounds now, scrabbling away from the dress, trying to get away back toward the window, back toward the chair and the awful chain bolted to the wall.

The phone rang and rang and then it stopped ringing as his screams took on a hoarse edge. He had rolled himself next to the window. A cockroach, she thought in wonder. A scuttling bug. She put the gun down, and yanked him back, rage fueling her, rage at what he’d put her through, at what he’d done to Katie. She dragged him a few inches until he was within range and clamped the cuff around his ankle.

Above him the tattered balloon gently streamered out with each gust of forced air. Grace punched the speaker button and suddenly Warren’s high-pitched wheezing, his thrashing struggle to breathe, filled the OR arena, the terrifying sound of a man on the edge of insanity whose airway had closed. His legs started to jerk.

In the OR, Opal went to the window and looked up in confusion and the beginning of alarm, sensing something was wrong. She ripped off her lab coat, the pager a wink of gray plastic as she left it behind and rushed for the door.

Grace scooped up the revolver and darted into the anteroom and pressed against the wall. She heard clicks, an electronic beep signaling the door was being unlocked. It snicked open.

Opal stood blinking in the half-light. Grace came down hard with the butt of the revolver, and Opal rocked back on her heels and sent a fist slamming into Grace’s arm, catching her by surprise and sending the gun flying.

The steel door was sliding shut.

Grace pushed past Opal and vaulted into the room. There was the sensation of air rushing and then silence as the door sealed shut.

She stumbled and regained her footing. Katie lay in stillness, her mouth open around the trach tube, her small, defenseless hands palms up, a drape over the bottom half of her body. Grace let out a breath, words tumbling in an incoherent rush of love and relief and alarm as she went to her and slid her arms underneath her body, holding her gently, a precious weighted cargo. “I’m here, honey. Mommy’s here. Everything’s okay now.”

Katie was cold. So cold.

Somewhere near Opal’s abandoned lab coat an alarm bleated. It wasn’t the same sound as the door opening, so Opal wasn’t coming back. The vent machine looked standard. It registered twelve breaths a minute, normal for a sedated child, with a tidal volume of 200 cc’s of air. She’d need to get somebody there to run tests. Her daughter’s lungs were paralyzed from the neuromuscular blocker. Katie would have to stay on the vent until the potent drug could be washed from her system and her own lungs could take over, and then she’d have to be brought up slowly and carefully.

It sounded like a microwave oven, Grace thought. But it was coming from the lab coat. The speakerphone was still on and she heard Opal’s exclamations, and the sounds of her scrambling through the room, and of Warren’s labored breathing.

An alarm sounded in some other part of the building, and a rumbling undertow gathered momentum, like a giant sea swell. As if a massive herd of people were moving at the same time.

Grace smoothed a clammy curl off Katie’s forehead. “Okay, sweetie, I’m going to have to figure out how to get us out of here.” Talking out loud to her daughter shored her up, and made her feel braver than she felt.

She studied the viewing window. It hung a good twelve feet above the sunken operating room. And the panes of glass were threaded with steel bolts. Even if she could stack everything in the room together and somehow break through the glass, the panes were too small for her to wriggle through, let alone safely transport a small inert body attached to a vent machine.

R2-D2, Grace thought. Or was it C-3PO? One of them talked in those little beeps.

Suddenly in the viewing window, Opal stared down at her, a gloating hatred animating her features. Warren wobbled against her, his head lolling.

“Fool,” Opal hissed, her voice reverberating through the OR room. “Don’t you know what you’ve done? There’s a bomb in the room, Grace. A bomb. You’ll never get out. Neither of you.”

The beeping was coming from the crash cart. Grace’s gaze went to the lab jacket Opal had torn off and left behind.

“It’s the pager. On my lab coat. That’s the bomb. The pager’s the bomb. I electronically activated it. The beeping’s going to stop pretty soon. And that means you have four minutes thirty seconds left. That’s it. Oh, you’ll get a thirty-second warning at the end so you’ll know.”

Grace stared at the pager. Her mouth went dry. The beeping stopped. There was only the sound of the vent machine. Red numerals whirred on the face of the pager:
4:27. 26. 25.

“You have less than five minutes before you and your precious daughter blow straight to hell. How do you like
that
Timer Game?”

Above them Grace heard a clattering roar and a scraping sound. A helicopter was landing on the roof and Opal lurched away from the window, one arm around Warren. They’d leave within minutes. Lift off into the sky.

With the hard money, the down payment from Belikond. Warren had that, but not the rest. Not the millions more he was counting on that came with the closing.

In the end, it was about money. And Warren had lost the only part that mattered to him.

But Grace was losing everything. A swelling rise of panic and pandemonium echoed dully through the sealed room and in front of her, numbers whirred in the last Timer Game she’d ever play. She was alone with her daughter. In a locked space with a bomb set to explode in less than five minutes. She’d die there with Katie.

There was no way out. They’d won.

Chapter 48

Terrified pandemonium greeted Mac in the halls, throngs pressing toward the stairwells. The alarm shrilled, the sound merging with the deafening cries and shouts of people fleeing. Lights flickered in the hall and over the stairwell, creating an eerie convergence of shadows and form.

“Attention, all patients. We are beginning a medical evacuation. Ambulatory patients, please move in an orderly fashion toward the exits. Medical personnel, please assist all patients off the ward before exiting.”
The voice through the speaker was calm, disembodied.

Patients in stretchers and wheelchairs jammed the hallways, as medical personnel worked at evacuating the most critically ill. Mac worked his way around a nurse bending over an old man on a gurney, holding an IV bag on his sunken chest.

Mac shifted Lee’s heavy body and made his way slowly against the current, pressing toward Warren and Lee’s lobby, screaming every time someone banged into his damaged arm.

The glass doors stood cracked and open. The steel door was sealed shut, the labs unreachable. The sirens had set off the phones; six lines at the receptionist’s station blinked impotently. The retina scanner glowed like a red eye.

His arms were tired now and his legs were starting to give way. He shifted Lee’s body so that he held it in front of him, and when he reached the red eye of the retina scanner, he gripped her with his good arm. Her head lolled back on his chest as if she were a lover. He was panting now, his face slick with sweat. He tilted her beautiful face and pushed open her eyelid, positioning her eye until it hit the red beam of the scanner.

For a moment he was afraid it wasn’t working, and then the door slid open and he laid her on the ground and went through.

__

No way out. Four minutes left. Less. Grace ran into the scrub room. It had been built out of cement blocks and was bare except for double sinks and a supply cabinet. The cement wall separating it from the operating room didn’t extend all the way up, but it would still afford them some protection. She wondered if she could squeeze Katie under the sinks, but what would happen if the sinks came loose in the blast?

Red emergency sockets had been placed in a wall to the left of the sink, so it had to be that wall that was structurally the most solid. Those were sockets powered by a generator during an earthquake. She’d remembered that from a sleepless night rocking Katie, when she’d channel-clicked to a public television station; red sockets meant emergency generators.

Okay, she’d put her on the floor next to that wall. Make a bed. Out of what? She pulled off her top and folded it. The cabinet. Had to be towels, something. She raced to it and yanked it open, praying it wasn’t empty.

A small set of towels sat on a metal shelf and she swept them up and feverishly carried them to the rough bed and added them to what she had. No time. She ran back into the main operating room. There was a cabinet in there and she found fresh sheets and towels, stopping only long enough to glance at the pager:
2:49.

In less than three minutes, the room would explode, taking her and Katie with it.

__

The hall corridor on the other side of the steel door was deserted. From here, the cries were muted. The building rumbled with the volley of footsteps in stairwells. Mac limped down the hall, pain coring his arm like an ax. “
Attention, this is not a test. Evacuate immediately. Do not delay.”

He pushed open a door and found himself in what had once been Warren’s library. It still had paintings on the walls, and some books, but it had the feel now of a set, something manipulated for effect, not real. He moved as quickly as he could. The pressure of blood pumping through his damaged arm was stronger the faster he moved, but it was a necessary trade-off.

Katie wasn’t there. He wasn’t going to allow himself to think about Grace, what she’d done. What she’d thought. He only hoped it hadn’t cost him his daughter.

He found a small bathroom and an adjoining conference room. Both empty. He went back into the hall and tried Lee’s lab. Empty and vacant. No shelves of beakers, DNA thermocyclers. No prop created to look like a heartin-a-box. Mac gripped his arm and padded down the narrow aisles, looking for Katie, and it seemed in that instant he’d always been looking for some part of her, something small and new that needed his protection and care. The lights in the building flickered as he lurched back into the hall.

Another lab, Warren’s. Empty, empty. What was going on?

The alarm shrilled and Mac knew time was running out. Where was she? What had they done with his daughter? The power surged. Shadows flicked and he held on to the wall, chasing it to the end. A second hall came off the long one at the end and he rounded the corner, moving faster. There was a door at the end of the hallway and it stood ajar.

Mommy.
Was that Katie?

Mac pushed the door open.