Any Means Necessary: A Luke Stone Thriller (Book 1) (13 page)

“You finish your homework, honey?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

He smiled.

She turned to him, and her face was serious. “You’ve done a bad thing, haven’t you?”

He wasn’t a child after all. He was a grown man, and she was the little old lady she became before breast cancer took her away.

He nodded. “I did a bad thing.”

“Can you make it right?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know if anything will ever be right again.”

9:30 a.m.

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center - Baltimore, Maryland

“Here come a couple of them,” Luke said.

He and Ed stood in a hospital corridor, about twenty yards from a door marked PHARMACY. A few moments before, Luke had tried to open it. It was locked. Up the hall, two men in blue scrubs and white lab jackets walked toward them. They were chatting and laughing about something.

There were surveillance cameras every at every corner. It didn’t matter. Luke planned to act fast. He was already in trouble. What was a little more?

“Excuse me, guys,” Luke said. “Are you men doctors?”

“Yes we are,” one said, a fit middle-aged guy in wire frame glasses. “What’s the trouble?”

Luke stepped close to the man. His gun was out. He pressed it to the man’s stomach, down low, away from the video cameras. He put a friendly hand on the man’s shoulder. “Don’t say a word, either of you.”

Ed stepped in close behind the second man. Luke could see a gun in Ed’s hand. He pressed the muzzle hard into the small of the second doctor’s back.

“We’re not going to hurt you, if you do exactly what I say.”

The first doctor, so confident a moment before, was trembling. “I…” he said. He couldn’t speak.

“It’s okay,” Luke said. “Don’t talk. I need you to open the door to the pharmacy over there. That’s all I need you to do. Open the door and come inside with me for a few minutes.”

The second doctor was calmer. He was balding, with thick glasses, more heavyset than the first. “That’s fine. If you need drugs, that’s fine. We’ll get you what you need. But there are security cameras everywhere. You’re not going to get very far.”

Luke smiled. “We’re not going very far.”

The men turned as a group and went to the door. The second doctor swiped his key card against the reader and the light turned green. Luke opened the door. Inside the room were numerous locked cabinets.

“What do you need?” the doctor said.

“Ritalin,” Luke said. “Two injections.”

“Ritalin?” the man said.

“Yes. Quickly now, I don’t have a lot of time.”

The doctor paused. “Sir, you won’t get high from Ritalin. If you have an attention deficit, you can easily get it with a prescription. You don’t have to go to all this trouble. There are programs that will help you pay. And anyway, Ritalin isn’t the preferred—”

Luke shook his head. “We’re not in school anymore, Doc. Let’s just assume I know what I’m doing, and you don’t know what I’m doing. Okay?”

The doctor shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He opened a cabinet, showed Luke the bottle, and prepared the injections. While he worked, Ed placed four plastic zip ties on the counter. He opened a drawer and found a couple of small hand towels and some surgical tape. He put the items next to the zip ties.

The doctor finished preparing the injections, and passed the syringes across the counter.

“Very good,” Luke said. “Thank you. Now I need you to do one more thing before we leave.”

“All right,” the doctor said.

“Take off your clothes,” Luke said. “Both of you.”

*

Luke and Ed, dressed in surgical gowns and gloves, walked through the crowd of police officers standing outside the door to Eldrick Thomas’s room. They paused and put their surgical masks on before they went in.

A yellow and black triangular sign was affixed to the door. DANGER: RISK OF RADIATION.

Beneath that was another sign. It was a series of instructions.

A. Visits limited to 1 hour per day. No pregnant women or persons under age 18 should visit the patient.

B. Visitors should remain at least 6 feet from the patient.

C. Visitors must be protected with gowns, shoe covers, and gloves. Visitors should not handle any items in the room.

D. Visitors must not smoke, eat, or drink while in the patient’s room. 

A cop touched Luke on the arm. “When can we expect him to wake up?”

Luke gave him the serious doctor face. “You mean
if
he wakes up. We’re doing the best we can. You guys just need to wait a little longer.”

They went inside. Thomas lay flat on a hospital bed, asleep. Random spots on his face and neck were flushed a deep, dark red. His wrists and ankles were fastened to the metal rails of the bed with plastic flex cuffs. Various machines monitored his vital signs. Two cops in surgical masks and gloves stood in one corner, as far from Thomas as the room would allow.

“Guys, can you please give us a few minutes with the patient?” Ed said.

“We’re not supposed to leave the room,” one cop said.

Ed said the magic words, the ones that would start a bureaucratic shoving match if the patient weren’t radioactive. “I’m sorry, but your presence conflicts with the provision of medical care.” Then he smiled. “Anyway, the guy is tied to the bed. He’s not going anywhere. Just give us a minute, okay?”

The cops went out, probably happy to get away.

Luke walked straight to Thomas’s side. He took the cap off the syringe, turned Thomas’s left arm, found the thick vein at the crook of his elbow, and gave him the injection.

“Ritalin, huh?” Ed said.

Luke shrugged. “It brings people right out of general anesthesia. Not exactly FDA approved, but it works like a charm.”

He stepped back. “Shouldn’t be long.”

A minute passed, then two minutes. Halfway through the third minute, Luke thought he saw a slight flutter in the eyelids.

“Eldrick,” he said. “Wake up.”

Eldrick’s eyes slowly opened. He blinked. He looked very tired. He looked like he was a hundred years old.

“My chest hurts,” he said, his voice rising just above a whisper. He glanced slowly around without moving his head. “Where am I?”

Luke shook his head. “It doesn’t matter where you are. You were in New York last night. You stole radioactive materials from Center Medical Center. You were working with Ken Bryant and Ibrahim Abdulraman. They were both murdered. So were two security guards.”

Memory flooded into the man’s face. He barely moved a muscle. He seemed so weak that he could die any minute. But his eyes were hard. “Cops?” he said.

Luke nodded. “We need to know where and when the bomb goes off.”

Eldrick Thomas looked at Ed. He made a gesture with his head toward Luke. “Hey, bro. Get this white devil pig out of here.” 

He closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. “After that, I’ll tell you whatever I know.”

*

Luke waited in the hall, fifty yards down from the wall of cops. It wasn’t long before Ed came out. He walked quickly.

“Come on, man. Let’s go.”

Luke walked fast, keeping up with Ed’s pace. “What’s up?”

“I think he had a heart attack,” Ed said. “Maybe the Ritalin was too much for him. I don’t know. I hit the alarm before I left.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Yeah. He did.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know if I can believe it.”

Luke stopped. Ed stopped, too.

“We need to keep walking,” Ed said.

Luke shook his head. “What’s the target?”

Above their heads, the hospital intercom came on. A woman’s voice, calm, mechanical, almost robotic.
Code Blue, Code Blue. Third Floor, Room 318. Third Floor, Room 318. Code Blue…
Frantic doctors and staff ran past them in the halls, bumping shoulders.

 “It’s timed for the start of Ramadan in Iran. 8:24 p.m., which is 10:54 a.m. here.” He looked at his watch. “Just over one hour from now.”

“Where?” Luke demanded.

Ed stared back grimly. For the first time, Luke saw despair on Ed’s face.

“The White House.”

10:01 a.m.

The skies between Baltimore and Washington DC

The pilots were bad-asses.

The chopper flew low and fast. The landscape buzzed by below them, almost close enough to touch. Luke barely noticed. He shouted into the telephone. He kept losing the call. The hand-off process from one cell tower to the next was iffy at over a hundred miles per hour.

“We need to evacuate the White House,” he said. “Trudy! Do you hear me?”

Her voice cut through the static. “Luke, there’s a warrant for your arrest. You and Ed. It just came through.”

“Why? Because of the doctors? We didn’t hurt them.”

There was a burst of static. The call dropped.

“Trudy? Trudy! Shit!”

He looked at Ed.

“He told me they were in the Dun-Rite Laundry van,” Ed said. “The signs were magnetic decals. They took them off in Baltimore, and changed the license plates. There may be surveillance cameras near where Thomas was found. They might pick up the trail on the van’s location that way.”

Luke’s phone rang. He picked it up.

“Trudy.”

“Luke, before you say another thing, let me speak. Eldrick Thomas is dead. He had a massive heart attack. You and Ed are on video surveillance. It’s clear in the video that you gave Thomas a shot of some kind.”

“Ritalin, to wake him up,” Luke said.

“Ed leaned in close just before Thomas died.”

“Trudy, Thomas was giving Ed the information. Do you understand? Eldrick Thomas is not the issue right now. The attack is planned for the White House. All the evidence points to a drone attack. They were in the Dun-Rite Laundry van. They changed the markings. We need to find the van and we need to get everyone out of the White House.
Now
.”

Another burst of static came in.

“They’re not going to… Luke? Luke?”

“I’m here.”

“They’re watching Grand Central and the Hoboken PATH station. They closed the Midtown Tunnel. I spoke with Ron Begley. They don’t believe it’s the White House. They think you killed Eldrick Thomas. The arrest warrant is for murder.”

“What? Why would I murder Eldrick Thomas?”

The phone cut out again.

Luke looked at Ed. “We’ll get the pilots to radio it in.”

Ed shook his head. “No good. Nobody’s going to believe us. And if we tell the pilots to radio it in, everybody’s going to know where we are. No. We have to go in ourselves. And we have to go in stealth.”

Luke went up to the cockpit and poked his head inside.

He knew these two—Rachel and Jacob. They were old friends of his, and they’d flown together for years. Both of them were former U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Luke and Ed were used to flying with people like this. The 160th SOAR were the Delta Force of helicopter pilots.

Rachel was as tough as they came. You don’t join an elite group of Army special operations pilots as a woman. You brawl your way in. Which was perfect for Rachel—her off-work hobby was cage fighting. Meanwhile, Jacob was as steady as a rock. His calm under fire was legendary, almost surreal. His hobby was mountaintop meditation retreats. The two of them might know Luke was suspended. They might even know there was a warrant for his arrest. But they also knew Luke was Delta, and they weren’t the types to ask too many questions.

“How close can you get us to the White House?” Luke said.

“You got a lunch date?” Rachel said.

Luke shrugged. “Come on.”

“South Capitol Street heliport,” Jacob said. “It’s a DC Metro Police pad, closed to all other traffic, but I know them. I can squeeze us in there. They’re about three miles from the White House.”

“I need an SRT car waiting for us,” Luke said. “No driver, just the car. Okay?”

“Got it,” Rachel said. She glanced back at him.

“I’ll tell you all about it later,” he said.

Luke went back to the hold. Ed stood by the open cargo door.

Luke shouted at him. “We got a helipad three miles from the White House, and we’ll have a car there that we drive.”

Ed nodded. “That sounds right.”

The phone rang again. Luke looked at the caller ID. He didn’t want to talk about arrest warrants anymore, or about who believed what. This time, when he answered, he barely spoke to her.

“Trudy, put Mark Swann on the phone.”

10:23 a.m.

Washington, DC

“We’re never going to make it.”

Luke drove the company SUV toward the White House through mid-morning traffic. It was stop and go. They were running out of time. 

The phone was plastered to his ear. It rang and rang. Finally, it picked up. For the third or fourth time in a row, he got her voicemail. She had told him that she and Gunner planned on going to the movies.

Her voice was vibrant and bright. He pictured her: beautiful, smiling, optimistic, and energetic. “Hi, this is Becca. I can’t answer your call right now. Please leave a message after the tone, and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

“Becca!” he said. He took a breath. He didn’t want to alarm her. “I need you to do something for me. I don’t have time to explain. When you get this message, drive straight to the country house. Don’t go home. Don’t stop to pick up anything. Just get on the highway and go. If you need anything, you can always get it over there. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.” He paused. “I love you both so much. Do this for me. Don’t hesitate. Just go now, as soon as you hear this.”

He hung up. Next to him, Ed sat ramrod straight. A thick vein stuck out on Ed’s forehead. He was sweating.

“We gotta get around this traffic somehow,” Luke said.

Ed reached into the glove compartment and pulled out an LED siren light. He mounted it on the dashboard, turned it on, and then hit the siren switch. Outside the car, the shriek of the siren was impossibly loud.