Patient (29 page)

Arlette motioned for Jessie to stop so that she could mentally pick through the story for inconsistencies.

“All right,” she said finally, “what happened next?”

Jessie released the death grip she had on the arm of her chair. She was improvising—flying almost blind. But so far at least, her account seemed to be holding up.

“I made up the story that Dr. Naehring might be coming into the OR to help me with part of the case. He’s a psychopharmacologist—someone who works with the sort of medications we use when patients are kept awake during brain surgery—so I thought if you checked up on him, his helping me would make some sense, at least as long as you didn’t try to call him.”

“That was very clever. Go on.”

“The night before the operation, I made it a point to say something to Dr. Booker about it when she was doing your husband’s pre-op physical.”

“I remember.”

“I wasn’t sure anyone was going to show up, but right in the middle of the case, someone from the FBI did. We were able to speak to one another by turning off our microphones and whispering. Because of the way the MRI magnets are set up, both Grace and Derrick were shielded by our backs.”

“What did this agent want?”

“He wanted to kill your husband, and then kill both of your people, and then go up to Surgical Seven and kill you.”

“And—”

“I had to tell him about the soman—that it was out there in the city someplace, and that you would have it released in a crowded area if anything happened to Claude. I also told him I had seen the way it killed the microbiology people.”

“That was good. What did he do then?”

Jessie regripped the chair. This chapter, the most farfetched of the fish tale, had to be totally believable—and diverting.

“He said he had a tiny transmitter in the locker room that he wanted me to insert into your husband’s head.”

“My, my,” she said.

“I told him the transmitter couldn’t be brought into the MRI room because of the magnets. They would destroy it and it might damage the machine. He argued with me that there must be a way to do it, but I assured him there wasn’t.”

“Then he left?”

“He did. He asked me how many people were being held on Surgical Seven and if anyone had been harmed. He said the FBI would work something out, but that no one would be placed in any more danger than they were in right now. Then he left. A few seconds later, I heard Derrick demand that he pull down his mask. Next thing I heard was shooting. I saw them take off, so I just finished the operation.”

For a full minute, Arlette studied her face, probing. Jessie forced herself to maintain eye contact.

“You’re certain they know about the soman,” Arlette said finally.

“I ... I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of anything else to tell them but the truth.”

“You did right. I want them to know. In fact, I’m thinking about giving them a demonstration.”

“No! ... I mean, please don’t. As long as it’s only a threat, I think the FBI will keep their distance. Once the gas is used, I think they’ll just do whatever is necessary to get at you. Ask your husband if you don’t believe me. There’s no need for a demonstration.”

“We’ll see,” Arlette said.

But Jessie could tell she understood the point. Once again, her hands stopped compressing the oak armrests.

“Could I please go and check on the other patients now?” she asked.

Arlette brought her hand across and rested it on the gun.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

A knot formed and tightened in Jessie’s gut.

“Well, everything I said is just the way it happened.”

“We shall see.”

Please. Please don’t hurt anyone.

“That woman Grace brought up from the operating room is an X-ray technician, is she not?” Arlette asked.

“She is,” Jessie replied, suddenly terrified for Holly. “Why?”

“I’m going to send her off the floor with Grace to bring back a portable X-ray machine.”

“For what?”

“I want a picture done of Claude’s head, that’s what. You knew that one of the first things I’d think of was that the FBI man wanted you to insert a tracer into Claude’s head. That’s just the sort of thing they do. So you thought that by telling me they had asked you to do it, I’d believe that you hadn’t. Well, I think you underestimate me. You did it, didn’t you?”

The knot loosened. Jessie actually had to keep her lips pressed tightly together to prevent a smile. She had almost rejected using the idea of the implanted transmitter because it sounded so far-out.

“Believe me,” she said with genuine conviction, “I did nothing but remove his tumor.”

“We’ll see. I think between Grace, Claude, and me, we should be able to spot the device on an X ray. As things stand, I owe you some distress for calling the FBI the way you did. But you did a good job in the operating room, so I’m going to let that go—as long as I don’t find out you are lying.”

“I’m not,” Jessie said, perhaps too quickly.

Again, Arlette searched her face for signs of deceit.

“When do you think Claude will be ready to travel?” she asked.

“Do you mean travel without risk?”

“No. I mean the soonest he could travel at all. He won’t have to sit up. We can keep him on a stretcher.”

“It’s hard to say, because I’ve never done an operation with the robot before. I guess a day. Two or three would probably be better. As you saw with Sara Devereau, things can happen.”

“That’s why you’re coming with us.”

“What?”

“Armand will give you a large canvas bag. I want you to fill it with whatever medical supplies you are likely to need in any situation or emergency that might arise with my husband.”

“When are we leaving?”

“When we leave, you’ll know,” Arlette said.

Chapter 39

Quincy Market Rotunda—RED TEAM

Green Line—Government Center—WHITE TEAM

Filene’s Basement—BLUE TEAM

??

IT WAS NEARING TEN IN THE EVENING. ALEX was in the van, parked on Cambridge Street, just across from the entrance to the MBTA Government Center station. He was flipping through the pages in one of the three loose-leaf notebooks he, Stan Moyer, and Vicki Holcroft had put together. The notebooks contained as much information and as many maps as they could accumulate on each of the three soman locations Claude Malloche had disclosed. They also contained the list of team members assigned to find the vials of gas. The teams were a mix of FBI, local police, National Guard, and several Army specialists in biologic and toxic warfare flown in from D.C.

Moyer was coordinating the Red Team, assigned to the center rotunda in the tourist mecca Quincy Market. Less than a mile away, Holcroft was organizing her Blue Team people in Filene’s Basement at busy Downtown Crossing. And in between them, Alex had taken responsibility for the largest team, with the daunting task of sweeping the sprawling Government Center T station.

The plan was straightforward enough, but did require the quiet cooperation of people in charge of each location. The teams would infiltrate their targets before they closed and hide out in various positions. Then, an hour or so after closing, they would seal off every window and systematically search until the gas had been found. Filene’s had closed at eight-thirty, and there, the search was already under way.

The cavernous Government Center station would be the toughest nut. The plan was to have it first be inspected and cleared out by transit security people. Then, at 2 A.M., Alex’s White Team would enter along the tracks through the tunnel from Haymarket station. The target would be divided into six-foot-square numbered grids and searched that way. A simple plan if ever there was one.

But there was one very major catch. Claude Malloche’s drug-induced revelations had been -fairly specific, but only up to a point.

How many vials are hidden in Boston?

Three ... four.

Alex had mentally replayed the snippet of his conversation with the killer a hundred times.

Three ... four.

What did that mean? Under heavy medication, Malloche had given out only three locations. Was there another? Malloche was a control freak. Would he ever allow a strategy that purposely deprived him of information? But on the other hand, he was also obsessive about detail—about having backup plans to his backup plans. Could he have covered himself for the possibility that either he or one of the others might be captured and tortured by having the location of a fourth vial withheld from him?

Is there another vial of soman?

Don’t know ... don’t know ... don’t know.

In the end, Alex felt that they had no choice but to go with what they had. But the existence of a fourth vial could by no means be discounted. The key to dealing with that possibility was finding Stefan—Malloche’s man on the outside. And the key to doing
that
was to have everything look exactly as he expected it to look until the very moment he pushed the button to release the gas.

Alex set the notebooks aside and swung around toward the aging police demolitions expert who was laboring at a small bench top beneath two powerful lights. The best of the best, he had asked the captain for. This rumpled senior citizen was the man they had sent. But Alex had already been with Harry Laughlin long enough today to know the captain hadn’t let him down.

“How’s it going back there?” he asked.

“Ten or fifteen minutes, boyo,” Laughlin said, with just a hint of a brogue. “I should know the deepest mysteries of this beastie in that time.”

The beastie laid out before him was the detonation system that had been used to kill the four microbiology technicians. To obtain it had meant Alex had to return to the cave of death. Under the cover of evening darkness, he had slipped back into the hospital through the door in the rear of the pathology department. Laughlin, well into his sixties, had listened to Alex’s description of what the lab would be like and, without batting an eye, had still insisted on going in with him.

“Once you’ve seen two buddies blown to bits tryin’ to defuse a canister,” he said, “nothin’ affects you that much. I’m with you all the way.”

“Tell me that afterward,” Alex had replied.

They donned paper surgical masks, then Alex pulled away the yellow plastic tape and eased open the door to the lab. The wall of stench hit them like a blast furnace, with the pungent smell of chemically burned flesh even more repugnant than the other odors.

“Still with me?” he asked.

“When did I ever say that?”

The bodies, including Derrick’s, were just as he had left them. But under the glare of their high-beam flashlights, the scene—the oddly positioned corpses, the rigor mortis, the blood, the vomit—looked even more eerie and repulsive. It took nearly half an hour, but they found the detonator still taped underneath an incubator stand—a neat package of circuits about five inches square. They carefully untaped it and set it in a plastic sack, along with shards of glass and what appeared to be a metal casing of some sort. Then, close to being overwhelmed by the hellish scene, they left.

“Nice place you took me to, there,” Laughlin said as they headed back to the van.

“If we can’t find and deactivate those other packages, Harry, we may get to see the scene again, only on a much grander scale.”

Now, Alex made his way back to where Laughlin was working.

“Okay,” the policeman said, “here’s the pitch. A small charge is detonated by radio and blows a glass vial to bits. If the gas works the way you say it does, the circuitry and explosive in the three locations may be the same as here, but the gas containers must be larger-probably much larger. I would guess the total size of the package may be a foot or so long, and maybe half that wide and deep.”

“Can you disable the system?”

“I believe I can, yes.”

“And then put it back together again so it looks the same but just doesn’t work?”

“With the gas?”

Alex thought about their need to draw Malloche’s man as close as possible to the vials so that one of their observers might get a fix on him.

“I’ll decide about that when we find one,” he said.

AT THREE-THIRTY In the morning, the Blue Team scored. The twenty members of Vicki Holcroft’s unit had drifted into the department store throughout the early evening, and had hidden on the upper floors until closing time. Then, after an hour’s wait, they had assembled in the basement and set up their grids. The key to completing their search was Harry Laughlin’s suggestion that the gas would not have been placed beneath clothes or inside of a cabinet where its diffusion would be restricted. Eliminating all cabinets, at least for the first pass through, made the search of the vast store basement at least manageable.

The deadly black glass cylinder, with its attached detonating device, was in plain sight, yet essentially invisible to any casual passerby. It was screwed in place beneath the customer side of a counter, not far from the escalator bringing shoppers up to the store from the Downtown Crossing MBTA station. The cylinder was shielded in front by a black metal plate drilled throughout with minute holes to allow diffusion of the poison.

Alex got word of the find at Filene’s as his White Team of forty were halfway through a grid-by-grid search of the Government Center Green Line station. He had assumed that the gas would be placed in a spot likely to be densely populated, and so had the search begin with the central area of the terminal, and slowly fan out toward the more remote stretches of track. So far, nothing.

Reluctant to be seen entering the department store at this hour, Alex had the MBTA supervisor accompany him and Harry Laughlin down into Park Street station, then through the Red Line tunnel to Downtown Crossing, and up the dormant escalator to Filene’s. Most of the Blue Team was sent back through the tunnels to join the White Team at Government Center. It was well after four and the station was due to be opened at five. A delay much later than six would certainly risk creating suspicion.

Alex donned a sealed antiexposure suit and ordered the transit authority supervisor, Vicki, and the two agents who would be left with her to try and spot Stefan, to wait for them at the base of the escalator. Laughlin set up a pair of powerful lights and lay down on the floor with his tools close at hand. He had refused the suit.

“The glass in them things fogs up too much for this kind of work,” he explained. “Besides, after what I went through to get that beastie from the hospital, if I blow this one, I’d be too embarrassed to want to live.”

“Obviously, you didn’t get a close enough look at those stiffs in the lab,” Alex replied. “I’m not afraid of biting the big one with a bullet or a blast, but I can’t stand the thought of puking to death.”

With Alex assisting, Laughlin took fifteen minutes to isolate the wire he wanted to cut.

“This cylinder’s a big one,” Laughlin said, “maybe ten times the content of the one that went off in the hospital. With any air movement at all, my guess is there’s enough to reach every cranny of this place.”

“At the moment, the only cranny I’m concerned about is this one.”

“You want me to leave everything here except this connection, right?”

“Yeah. If he comes by and checks, I want it all to look normal. Then, if he tries to detonate the thing, he won’t know whether the screwup is in the circuitry or the transmitter. Something he’ll do at that point will call attention to himself. I’m sure of it.”

“Actually, we can do better than that,” Laughlin said. “Looking at the components of this receiver, I’m making an educated guess that the transmitter that will set it off is working somewhere on the VHF band. Once I get this thing deactivated, I have a scanner that should be able to isolate the frequency. Then all we have to do is give monitors to your people who are here, and they should know the instant someone tries to blow this thing.”

“That’s perfect. Will it be the same for all three setups?”

“Most likely, but we’ll check just to be sure. First, though, we’ve got to neuter this beastie. Okay, then, here goes. Just like in the movies.”

The click of the wire cutter was like a gunshot.

“Nothing,” Alex said after finally exhaling.

“That’s the idea, bucko. In my job, nothing is
very good
.”

At that moment, Alex’s cell phone went off. The Red Team had located the soman package bolted beneath a stool in the rotunda of the Quincy Market food court.

THE UNKNOWN KILLER virus at Eastern Mass Medical Center remained headline news—especially now that a team from the MRI operating room had been placed on isolation precautions. Sitting at Sara’s bedside, Jessie had watched the bogus story unfold on the first news program of the morning, complete with clips of Michelle Booker’s businessman husband complaining that, although he had been assured by hospital administrators that his wife was all right, he had not heard a word from her since she left for the hospital twenty-four hours ago.

Now, in the supply room, Jessie systematically loaded the black nylon gym bag with first aid supplies and lifesaving equipment, recording the items on a pad so that nothing would be overlooked. Next, she would raid the med room and stock up on all manner of drugs. The charade on Surgical Seven was wearing thin to the outside world. Arlette knew that as well as she did. It was only a matter of time before antiterrorist rescue teams came calling. Arlette planned to be gone when they did.

Tracheotomy kit ... laryngoscope ... breathing bag ... endotracheal tubes ... hydrocephalus drainage system ... urinary catheters ... IV infusion sets ... twist drill ... blood pressure cuff ... scalpel ... sutures ...

Arlette, Grace, and Malloche had studied the portable X ray of Claude’s head. For the moment at least, Arlette seemed to believe Jessie’s tall tale about Mark Naehring. It was almost six in the morning. Malloche had been sleeping most of the time since his surgery, but he was always easy to arouse, and appeared to be doing remarkably well. Still, moving him at this point carried some danger. Jessie knew that Arlette was weighing her options, just as Jessie was weighing the merits of encouraging them to leave, versus stalling to give Alex more time. Leaving might well remove the patients and staff from harm’s way. Stalling for time might save lives on the outside, especially if Arlette planned to use the chaos of a massive toxic gas exposure to divert attention from the hospital.

If only there was a way to get word from Alex about the results of his search. But she knew there wasn’t.

Jessie was in the med room, loading a box with antibiotics, antiseizure meds, injectable steroids, anticoagulants, and tranquilizers, when she made the decision to do whatever she could to maintain the status quo by keeping the Malloches from leaving. She had seen firsthand the horrors of soman, and she trusted that Alex wouldn’t risk the carnage that would result from an assault on Surgical Seven. The longer she could stall their departure, the more chance he had of finding the three vials. All she needed was a plan.

Jessie looked down at the drug in her hand and realized the answer, the plan, was that close. Injectable diazepam—Valium. She filled several 5-cc syringes and carefully wrapped the empty vials in paper towels before throwing them into the trash.

You don’t know it, Claude
, she was thinking,
but you’re about to take a little turn for the worse.

SIX FORTY-FIVE. A mechanical breakdown in the Government Center station had forced a two-hour delay. At least, that was the story the media had been fed. Dozens of buses had been rolled into service to bypass the station. The Blue Line, which also used Government Center, was being delayed as well.

Alex knew that the massive interruption was a potential red flag. But it was early, and Malloche’s man, assuming he was even awake yet, had three locations to keep track of—at least three. With the addition of the Red Team, the force searching the station was now almost eighty—an irony that was hardly lost on Alex. For five years he had toiled alone and in obscurity, tilting at a deadly windmill that some in power denied even existed. Now, here he was, commanding a small army.