Carmichael flew through the air and hit the ground hard, landing several yards away.
Rigel heard the man’s clavicle break as it met the concrete floor.
Carmichael lay on the ground, disoriented, trying to comprehend what had just happened. A second earlier he had the man in his sights, ready not just to tackle him but to careen right through him, pick him up, run him the length of the room, if necessary, slam him hard into the wall, knock him unconscious, call hospital security, tend to the wounded man, then check on his friend. Instead he lay on the ground, staring up at the metal catwalk. He’d experienced his share of football injuries in his day and knew one thing was certain: his shoulder was broken. The man, though smaller than him but stocky and athletic in his own right, was obviously a highly skilled martial artist. He had taken advantage of his powerful momentum, turned it deftly against him, evaded the attack like nothing he had experienced before, and done so with little effort. Carmichael fought against the white-hot pain, rolled on his uninjured side and struggled to his knees. He tried to fend off the man’s offensive attack, a brutal kick to his ribs, couldn’t, and fell to the floor. He pulled his legs up to his chest, protecting his vital organs, tasted blood, then heard a strange sound above him- zzzippp. He looked up. The orderly was standing over him, a braided metal cord stretched between his hands. “Fucking hero,” the orderly said as he straddled his back. “I really, really, really hate heroes.” Carmichael felt the cold steel loop around his neck.
The gunshot narrowly missed Rigel. He dove to the side, used the big man for cover, watched Hanover’s arm drop and the weapon fall to the ground, and used the opportunity to escape. He scrambled away from the maintenance engineer as the cop retrieved his weapon, raised it again, and squeezed off a second round. The bullet whizzed across his cheek, grazed his skin, and pinged off the metal boiler under which he had taken cover. He slipped out from beneath the boiler, ran toward the open floor hatch, pulled the safety flare from his waistband, cracked its safety seal, and threw it into the center of the room beyond the reach of the cop.
Chris Hanover struggled to his feet, choking on the acrid smoke billowing from the flare which had quickly begun to fill the room.
A voice called out from the other side of the caustic cloud. “Are you nuts? This room is filled with high pressure equipment. You want to blow us the hell up? Stop firing!”
Carmichael emerged from the smoke. He was in obvious pain and struggled to walk. Slowly, he made his way to Hanover.
“FBI!” Hanover yelled. “Stop where you are!”
“Hey man,” Carmichael said. “I just got a broken shoulder and probably a few broken ribs trying to save your ass. Least you could do is not shoot me.”
Hanover lowered the Glock and headed in the direction of the orderlies last known position. “Did you see where he went?”
“Hell, no!” Carmichael replied. “I was too busy trying not to die.”
“Call security,” Hanover commanded. “I need to find him before he leaves the hospital.”
“And tell them what?” Carmichael said. “That you’re looking for an orderly… in a hospital?”
Hanover spied an open hatch in the floor, saw the orderly lower the cover. He ran, stumbled, reached the cover, tried to pry it open, couldn’t. Locked. He heard shuffling beneath the concrete floor, moving away from him.
Carmichael had caught up to him. “Where does this lead?” Hanover asked.
“Everywhere,” the engineer replied. “It’s a subterranean service level, mostly for electrical gear.”
“Is there an exit point?”
“An exit point? Try dozens of them, all over the hospital.”
The smoke from the burning flare had risen to the ceiling, reached the fire detection system and activated the emergency sprinkler valves. Water sprayed down upon the two men.
Carmichael tried to raise his hand and shield his face from the water, but his broken ribs restricted his mobility. “You’re FBI?” he asked.
Hanover nodded. “Yeah.”
Carmichael winced as he raised his shirt and inspected his damaged ribs.
“You saved my life back there,” Hanover said. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“How’re the ribs?”
“Better than your neck by the look of it. Who the hell is that guy?”
In the melee, Hanover had forgotten about the laceration he sustained from the metal cord. He massaged his neck, checked his fingers for blood, found none, shook his head. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.” He pointed to the hatch. “I need to know the termination points for this network. Can you get me a set of blueprints?”
“You bet.”
“I need them yesterday.”
Carmichael nodded, then shuffled toward the staircase. “On it.”
“You sure you’re okay?” Hanover asked. “That was a pretty bad spill you took.”
Carmichael played down the near-incapacitating pain in his shoulder and wrist. “Don’t worry about me,” he said, opening the door at the top of the landing. “I’ll get checked out later. Right now, I want this prick as badly as you do.”
“Special Agent Chris Hanover,” Chris said, identifying himself to the big man. “Have the hospital page me when you get those blueprints.”
“Abe Carmichael. Will do.”
Hanover waited until Carmichael had left the room, then called Dunn. “Sir, you need to get the family out of here and lock down the hospital,” he said. “Someone just tried to kill Mrs. Quest.”
“Is she all right?” Dunn replied.
“I think so. I’m heading back to her room now.”
“Carnevale and I will meet you there. Where are you?”
“Basement, mechanical room. Whoever tried to take out Mrs. Quest just tried to kill me too.”
“You okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you have him in custody?”
“No, sir. He’s still somewhere in the facility. He killed one civilian, tried to kill another.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Sir, under the circumstances, I think Mrs. Quest and her family should be placed into protective custody immediately. It’s starting to look like that plane crash was no accident.”
“I agree,” Dunn said. “You stay with Jordan. I’ll assign a team to the estate. We’re on our way.”
Chris returned to the sixth floor. Jordan’s nurse stood outside her room talking to the security guard.
“How’s she doing?” Chris asked. He stepped inside, checked on Jordan, saw she was sleeping.
“Stable,” the nurse replied, “and scared to death.”
Hanover turned to the guard and pointed to the security cameras mounted in the ceiling. “I need to see the footage from those cameras right away.”
“Yes, sir,” the guard replied.
23
HARRISON TASKER LEFT the aircraft hangar and drove the sedan containing the body of the dead fire captain in its trunk to the Runway 69 Gentleman’s Club located on the outskirts of LAX airport. He parked beside his black Mustang GT, popped the trunk, removed a leather travel bag, and entered the club. A heavily tattooed biker nicknamed ‘Grease,’ stood guard at the front door. Tasker tossed him the keys and motioned to the fire captain’s car. “One to go,” he said. The biker understood, nodded, removed his microphone from the clip on his shoulder and radioed for assistance. A second biker soon appeared, took the keys from Grease, hopped into the maroon sedan, and drove off. The biker would make sure the fire captain and his vehicle were never seen again.
Tasker changed out of the captain’s uniform into his own clothes, bagged the garments, handed them to Grease for destruction, fired up the Mustang, and followed the GPS tracking signal his New York handlers had provided him to locate and eliminate the contractor. Traveling from the club to downtown Los Angeles, he reached Angel of Mercy Hospital, slowed the vehicle, and watched the flashing dot on the screen begin to flicker, t
hen turn solid blue, placing the contractor, James Rigel, his target, somewhere inside the medical facility. He pulled the car into a short-term parking lot across the street from the hospital, overfed the meter, crossed the street, and entered the building through the main lobby, at which point he was promptly stopped by hospital security.
The guard raised his hand as he walked through the automatic doors. “I’m sorry, sir. Visitor hours ended half an hour ago.”
Harrison Tasker checked his watch and removed his glasses. He squinted at the guard, fumbled for a cleaning cloth inside the breast pocket of his sport jacket and polished the lenses. Tall, black, powerfully built, with a broad chest, square jaw and tree-trunk neck, he could easily have been mistaken for a professional athlete. He had, in fact, in his early twenties, enjoyed a brief stint with the Oakland A’s baseball club until ending the career of the club’s in-development pitcher, Wayne Flynn. The A’s saw a stellar future for Flynn in the majors. But when an argument about the attention being paid to Tasker by the man’s wife concluded with Tasker clamping his hand around the arrogant SOB’s throat, pinning him against the dugout wall and smashing his pitching hand to jelly with a baseball bat, Oakland promptly fired him, Tasker kept the bat as a souvenir. Over the next two years he gained a reputation for knocking out more teeth in bar room brawls than he had ever hit baseballs out of ballparks. With his pro-sport career in the dust and his only resume an arrest record more impressive than his baseball stats had ever been, he soon came to the attention of New York. When they offered him the opportunity to put his sociopathic proclivities to more professional use, Harrison Tasker soon transitioned from bone cruncher to full-time contract killer.
Tasker watched as an LAPD police car screeched to a halt outside the main entrance to the hospital, followed quickly by a second cruiser and undercover sedan. The LAPD officers stepped out of their vehicles and conferred. The plainclothes officers exited their car and ordered the uniforms to take up positions elsewhere on the grounds. One of the black-and-whites blocked the main entrance to Angel of Mercy from the road while the second rounded the corner and headed for the rear exit to the building. The undercover cops walked into the hospital. Tasker heard them identify themselves as FBI agents and give the security guard explicit instructions. Under no circumstances was anyone to leave the facility until further notice. He watched the agents board the elevator. The lobby display panel indicated the cab stopped on the sixth floor.
Professional instinct told him why the police were there and why the place was in lockdown. On his way to the hospital, local radio stations frequently retold the story of the day– the horrific jet crash at LAX. Speculation about the reason for the crash ranged from being nothing more than a tragic accident to an act of domestic terrorism. Tasker recalled his assignment. He had followed his instructions to the letter and tampered with the aircraft exactly as specified. New York wanted the crash to look like an accident: a tire blowout during takeoff, the result of a mechanical oversight, missed in the pre-flight inspection. Tasker had found the log, altered the PSI number as correctly recorded by the mechanic, over-inflated the tires by thirty percent, placed several key tools on the floor of the hangar, and wiped down the tires with jet fuel. The prints on the tools and equipment belonged to the lead mechanic responsible for the aircraft’s final inspection. The balance of the assignment was watch and wait. Experts in New York had calculated the aircraft’s speed required for takeoff, time of day, outside temperature, the heat of the tarmac, and distance to the concrete marker located at the end of the runway. As predicted, when the tires blew the jet immediately dropped, clipped the berm, and struck the ground, assuring catastrophic consequences. But New York failed to take into consideration the near impossible: that someone might actually survive the crash. Evidently Rigel had heard the news, disregarded all attempts by New York to contact him, and taken it upon himself to find and terminate the survivors in order to fulfill the terms and conditions of his contract. He had no idea that his agreement with New York had already been rescinded and that he had now become as much a target as the individuals which he sought to kill.
Tasker feigned surprise at the police activity. He placed his glasses on his face and adjusted the frames so that they sat more comfortably on the bridge of his nose. “What’s going on?” he asked the guard.
“An FBI agent was attacked tonight.”
“Here?” Tasker asked. “In the hospital?”
The guard nodded. “Not more than twenty minutes ago.”
Rigel, Tasker thought. Had to be. No other operative would be foolish enough to take on the FBI in a facility as secure as this.
“You been following the news?” the guard asked.
“Not really,” Tasker lied.
“You don’t know about the jet crash at LAX?”
Tasker shrugged.
“You know who Michael Farrow is, right?”
“Name sounds familiar.”
“The tech billionaire. It was his plane that crashed. Guy’s dead. So’s his family, except for his daughter. She’s upstairs. Got a few bumps and bruises from what I hear. Other than that, she’s all right.”
“Holy shit.”
The guard nodded, then checked himself and shook his head. “I probably shouldn’t have told you that.”
Tasker returned the cleaning cloth to his pocket and brought his finger to his lips. “Mums the word.”
“Thanks, man,” the guard said. “Sorry, but with the place in lockdown I can’t let you in. Can I relay a message? Did you come to visit someone?”
“No.”
The guard looked puzzled.
“Lost my wallet this afternoon,” Tasker lied. “Could have been here, maybe someplace else, I don’t know. I thought I’d retrace my steps, ask around, see if maybe somebody found it and turned it in. You hear of anything?”
“Not to my knowledge,” the guard replied. “Best thing would be to check with Lost and Found in the morning.”
“I suppose,” Tasker agreed.
The men watched a third LAPD unit roll to a stop at the front entrance. “Tell you what,” the guard said. “Give me a sec. I’ll put it over the radio and ask around. But I better talk to these guys first, let ‘em know the FBI’s here.”
“Do your thing,” Tasker said. He pointed to a bench outside the gift shop. “Mind if I wait over there?”
“Not at all,” the guard said. He looked Tasker up and down. “Man, you are one big dude,” he said. “Ever play football?”
“Nah,” Tasker replied. “Never really been much into sports. I’m more of a bookworm.”
“What a waste,” the guard said. He shook his head. “You could have broken a few bones out on the field.”
Tasker smiled. “Yeah, and with my luck they’d all be mine.”
The guard laughed. “Sit tight, okay? I’ll be right back.”
Tasker nodded. He watched the guard walk to the front entrance to greet the arriving officers. He waited until he was alone in the empty lobby then headed down the corridor, found an exit door, left the hospital, returned to his car, and checked Rigel’s GPS coordinates.
No signal flashed on the screen.
The ghost app New York had covertly installed on the contractor’s cellphone had stopped transmitting his location. Rigel’s signal was gone.
Tasker slammed his fist against the steering wheel. “Sonofabitch!”
24
RIGEL HURRIED THROUGH the narrow service space beneath the mechanical room floor, negotiating his way between pipes and around electrical cables. After his failed attempt to kill both the FBI agent and Jordan Quest, he needed to find a way out of the hospital as soon as possible. If the facility wasn’t already crawling with local cops and federal agents, it soon would be.
No operation had ever gone so wrong, so fast.
He turned on his phone. Sandwiched between two concrete floors the device provided no cellular signal but offered a useful solution to his predicament. In the dark conf
ined space, the bright screen illuminated the passageway. He could see well enough to find a suitable exit, preferably one that led back to the Laundry Services department where he had stashed his clothing and belongings behind the commercial clothes dryer.
Rigel followed a circuitous path through the service space, first turning left, then right, left again for another fifty feet, then right. Ahead, light seeped through the edges of a second-floor hatch, eclipsing the access point to the room in which it was located. The scent of clean clothes confirmed he had found Laundry Services. Rigel ascended the ladder, tried to lift the hatch cover, couldn’t. He tried again, pushing it up with greater force than his previous attempt. The hatch refused to open. Although free within the facility, here in the bowels of the hospital he was, for all intents and purposes, trapped.
He heard voices above, followed by footsteps, coming towards the hatch. Had his attempt to lift the hatch been seen and aroused the curiosity of the employees in the room? Worse yet, had he somehow been tracked? Post 9/11, most major institutions had become hypervigilant and tightened their security. Angel of Mercy was the largest hospital in downtown Los Angeles. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that the institution had installed security cameras throughout the facility, including this subterranean service passageway. Perhaps the authorities were waiting for him on the other side of the hatch, weapons drawn, prepared to take him into custody the second he raised the cover and poked his head up from beneath the floor. Rigel steadied himself. If he was about to come face to face with police in his attempt to escape, he would fight his way out. At the very least he would take a few of them with him before he died.
More commotion from above, then the clack-clack of wheel locks being released. Wheels rolled over the access cover, first one set, then another. Rigel visualized the room, then understood why he could not lift the hatch: a service cart had been resting on top of it. Heavy with garments, the weight of the cart had made the cover impossible to lift. The wheels of the cart squeaked as it rolled away. Relieved of the pressure of the cart, the hatch’s metal hinges creaked. Rigel waited, then tried the hatch once again. It lifted with ease. He raised it high enough to permit him to see into the room and judge the timing of his ascent into Laundry Services. He couldn’t afford to be seen. There was no time to make up a viable story which would convince the staff of the reason for his sudden appearance. He needed to get to the dryer, change his clothes, and leave the hospital while he still could.
The Jordan Quest FBI Thriller Series: Books 1-3: The Jordan Quest FBI Thriller Series Boxset Book 1 Page 10