The Cyclops Conspiracy (36 page)

The doctor continued to urge Jason to lie still. “I need to finish my examination, Mr. Rodgers!” Jason pushed her hands away. “Call the OR and get a room,” the doctor barked to a nurse. “I want an IV of D5W and one-half normal saline, wide open. Type and cross match
four units of blood. I want a Chem-12. Give him 50 mg of meperidine IV. Let’s pack that wound until we can get him to the OR. Also, I want to start intravenous antibiotics. Start with Zosyn 3.375 mg every six hours. Who’s the surgeon on call?”

The nurse replied with a name. The doctor turned back to Jason. “You’ve got a pretty severe wound here, Mr. Rodgers. You’re bleeding pretty heavily. We’re going to start you on a medicine to prevent any infection and give you something for the pain.”

“Marvelous,” he groaned.

The trauma room was flanked by other treatment rooms filled with patients. Nurses, doctors, attendants, and paramedics—all wearing different-colored surgical scrubs—hurried in every direction. Their numbers did not instill Jason with confidence. If Zanns had the ability to buy off a deputy, who else might be on her payroll? He might go to surgery and wake up dead.

The portly nurse entered, pulled down Jason’s drawers, and stabbed a needle into his buttock.

He had to leave! Now! As he told himself this, a sliver of opportunity presented itself.

Outside the trauma room, shouting and screaming erupted. Apparently, another patient was causing some trouble. Nurses and doctors ran past. Probably a drunk or a druggie flipped out on meth.

The deputies at the door glanced at Jason. Jason peeked out through a forest of lashes, pretending to be unconscious—and waited.

“Haldol 5mg IM now,” someone shouted.

“More restraints!”

One deputy moved toward the noise, out of sight, motioning for the other—the one that had betrayed Jason—to stay put.

Seconds later, a scrum of three people crashed to the floor. Another explosion of noise erupted outside the door.

“Get hold of his hands!”

Struggling, grunting, swearing.

“Grab his arm! I need some help here!”

Two bodies flew onto the floor in full view of Jason’s room. The patient landed on top of the first deputy. The second deputy glanced at Jason, who lay perfectly still.

The scuffle moved farther down the hall. Another look.

“He’s trying to get my gun!”

The second deputy shook his head, sighed, and moved off.

Now!

Jason leapt from the bed, his side screaming in protest. He darted from the room toward the emergency entrance, clad only in his blood-stained skivvies and flip-flops. He raced past the nurse’s station and the med room. The portly nurse looked up and saw the half-naked blur. Her eyes popped. “You! Stop!”

Two paths were open to him. Straight ahead, a hallway led deep inside the hospital. To the right were the sliding doors of the emergency entrance, the same doors through which he had been wheeled less than an hour ago. An ambulance had pulled in. Two paramedics were unloading an elderly patient on a gurney. The glass doors were sliding open.

Jason arrived before they were fully open, hitting them hard with a shoulder. The doors crashed outward, off their tracks. The paramedics’ heads whipped toward the sound.

Jason rammed the closest paramedic and the gurney simultaneously. He bolted around the stretcher and the stunned paramedics on his way to the truck cab. He climbed in, found the gearshift, and punched the accelerator. The rig lurched forward, its two rear doors, still open, swinging violently.

The sparse traffic on Interstate 64 yielded to the flashing lights of the ambulance. Jason had driven through every traffic light between the hospital and the on ramp, attracting attention but no concern. He was doing eighty, heading out of the city without a destination. A fleet of police cruisers would soon be hot on his bumper like rabid hounds.

Air rushed through the open windows of the cab. Blood continued to trickle out of the gash in his side, adding a fresh layer to the crusted bandage. His eyelids felt heavy, and the pain and his consciousness lessened with each minute. The meperidine, a potent narcotic, was slowly exerting its grip on his senses.

Jason mashed the accelerator to the floorboard. The eight cylinders kicked in. The vehicle lurched, notching the speedometer toward ninety…ninety-five. It zipped under the Jefferson Avenue overpass toward the northern stretches of Newport News and Williamsburg beyond.

Have to…get…word to Peter.

He shook his head, trying to clear the accumulating cobwebs. All that did was make him dizzy. The ambulance drifted onto the solid,
white line of the service lane. Jason overcorrected, swinging back over the dotted center line. Fortunately, traffic was very light. Ten minutes later, the exit ramp sign for Route 199 in Williamsburg zipped past.

Have to find…another car!
Through the fog, he remembered the hotel across from Water Country.
Ditch the ambulance
…

He hit the exit too fast. He jerked the wheel to the right to keep from soaring into the wooded ravine. The front left tire flirted with the edge of the asphalt, spewing dirt and debris. He jerked the wheel even farther right. Equipment crashed about in the cabin behind him.

Speeding onto 199, he sideswiped two sedans, crunching fenders and spinning them into the median. To his left, brief glimpses of white caught his eye. Large alabaster busts towered behind the thin green foliage.

Presidents Park! Through the drug-induced fog, Jason concocted a plan.

His forearms sagged on the top of the steering wheel. His eyelids struggled to stay open, and his head bobbed. The vehicle slowed to sixty-five, teetering on the edge of control, drifting into the grassy median, jostling Jason to semialertness.

He hit the intersection just beyond the hotel, driving though the oncoming traffic. Blaring horns and screeching, smoking rubber filled the air. A row of hedges were flattened under the wheels of the rescue vehicle. It wasn’t pretty, but he managed to find the roadway curving behind the hotel toward the tourist attractions.

Jason stopped dead center in the deserted parking area, lights still flashing. He fell out of the door, landing on his chest and face. Stumbling to his feet, Jason attempted a run, managing only an unsteady, weaving gait. He pressed on. The adrenaline coursing through him was fighting a losing battle with blood loss, pain, and the narcotic. He staggered through a thicket of trees onto the adjacent hotel campus. What little food there was in his stomach wanted out, and began crawling to the back of his throat. In the distance, he heard the thump-thump of rotors. A helicopter.

Have to find…someplace to lie…down!

Guests were few and far between. After Labor Day, the tourists dried up, closing Water Country and Busch Gardens. The hotel was operating on a skeleton crew. A few cars dotted the asphalt of the hotel parking lot.

Heading away from Jason, a hotel employee pushed a cart to a trash enclosure. He had propped open the back door with a plastic dustpan. Jason raced unsteadily to the doorway and stepped inside.

A stairway sat to the left. He opened the stairwell door and slipped in. Falling to his knees, he crawled under the angle of the stairs behind a collection of toilet paper cartons and cleaning supplies. The outer door swung shut on its hydraulic closer as the Newport News police helicopter appeared over the trees two miles downrange, its rotors thumping as fast as Jason’s heart.

It was the last sound an exhausted and medicated Jason heard before he passed out.

The mere mention of Jason Rodgers’s name was enough to get Special Agent Broadhurst to drop everything and rush over to the York County Sheriff’s Office. He sat impatiently in a conference room. With the christening only twenty-four hours away, he had a thousand things to do. The only reason he was here was because Investigator Baxter had phoned, mentioning Jason Rodgers’s name and claiming he had information Broadhurst would want to see. He’d refused to discuss it over the phone. That rare but familiar feeling had sprouted in his gut. It was more than the acid eating away at the lining of his stomach. He’d only had it twice before in his career. Both occasions had required firing his weapon.

Hundreds of threats were investigated every month by the service. Each and every lead had to be checked out. Most were crackpots blowing off steam. Some were real and had to be squelched before they amounted to anything. A rare few made the news. If they had to act to protect the “Man” from an assassin the day of an event, the service had failed. Broadhurst hoped the Rodgers case was not going to be one of those failures.

On the way over, Broadhurst discussed the latest intelligence with Simon Vanover in the Norfolk field office. The tension in Vanover’s voice was palpable. The news would not be good.

The agents tailing Rodgers had lost the suspect outside a local restaurant after their car had been struck by another vehicle, Vanover explained. By the time a backup vehicle could be obtained, Rodgers had slipped away. His residence was dark and vacant. Rodgers had been smart enough to stay away. There had been no hits on his credit or debit cards. A trace on his cell phone revealed it was locked away in a drawer at the jail in Williamsburg.

Jason Rodgers had vanished.

Until an hour ago, Broadhurst hadn’t considered the pharmacist a legitimate threat. He didn’t fit the profile. His past was devoid of controversial political activities. He hadn’t had a traffic ticket in the last three years. There was no history of mental illness. Rodgers just seemed incredibly stupid or naïve.

Vanover’s next tidbit sent Broadhurst’s gut into a fiery eruption. The forensic accountants in the investigative branch had completed a background check and hastily obtained a search warrant to examine Rodgers’s finances. Fifty thousand dollars had been deposited from an enterprise named Cooper Venture Capital in two separate transactions within the last two weeks, by far the largest deposit the man had ever made. It was the first hard evidence corroborating what Broadhurst’s gut was telling him. Photos of the carrier at the dry dock, the pharmacist’s visit to the Windsor Towers yesterday, and now the revelation that he’d pocketed a large amount of cash…

It was time to bring in the pharmacist for more intense questioning. It was Friday afternoon. The christening was tomorrow morning. Broadhurst would make sure, at the very least, that Rodgers remained out of commission until after the christening.

Broadhurst shook two Tums from the plastic container and popped them in his mouth, crunching them. He’d devoured half the bottle since this morning.

What the hell’s taking so long?

A large black man walked in. “Agent Broadhurst, I’m Lieutenant Cal Baxter. Sorry to keep you waiting.” Baxter eased into one of the chairs.

“What’s all this about?” Broadhurst demanded. “I’ve got a lot to do.”

“You’ll be very interested in what we found,” Baxter replied. He removed a plastic bag containing several papers from a file folder. “We executed a search warrant today on Jason Rodgers’s residence. We found these documents. He’s a prime suspect, the only suspect actually, in the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Sheila Boquist.”

“Is that the one I read about in the papers this morning?” The article had been a two-column job above the fold of the
Hampton Roads Gazette
and hadn’t mentioned suspects.

“One and the same. These documents were found among his things. I thought you’d be interested in them.” Baxter slid the plastic bag across the table.

Broadhurst studied the documents for two minutes. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered.

One was an itinerary of the events for Saturday’s christening. The second was a seating chart with the names and locations of each of the dignitaries attending, including both presidents. Two large red
X
s marked the current president’s seat and the podium, where dignitaries would be delivering remarks. The final piece of paper was a list of speakers and times.

All of it was classified.

The fact that Rodgers had this kind of information sent a cold shiver down Broadhurst’s spine. There were only a handful of people on the planet privy to these details. A few were in the administration; the rest were employed by the Secret Service. Someone had leaked information about the presidential trip to Newport News. It made finding Jason Rodgers job number one.

Broadhurst was hoping the good Lord was looking over his shoulder as he asked his next question. If Rodgers had been arrested, it would explain why Vanover’s men couldn’t find him. And it would
make the Secret Service agent’s job much easier. “I want to talk to him immediately,” he said. “Do you have him in custody?”

Baxter cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, Rodgers was stabbed by another prisoner while in custody and was taken to Tidewater. He escaped. That’s why I kept you waiting. I was getting the rundown from the Newport News PD.”

“How the hell did you guys manage to let this guy escape? He’s a potential assassin!”

“Why is Rodgers a threat to the president?”

“He was detained for questioning a few days ago after photographing the aircraft carrier. Claimed not to know it was verboten. Based on
this
evidence”—Broadhurst shook the papers—“it seems he’s been scouting out the location. We had agents tailing him. They lost him last night, probably because you guys had arrested him.”

“You have been tailing him, and you didn’t bother to let us know?”

The cool cement smelled like a mildewed men’s locker room. Jason’s eyelids fluttered. The cinder block wall and brown cardboard boxes gradually came into sharp focus. He sat up and bumped his head on the underside of the stairs, jogging his memory of recent events.

Jason crawled around the supplies to the stairwell door and peeked down the hall. The corridor ran the length of the building and emptied into the small foyer at the front. The voice of a woman making small talk drifted from the foyer.