A shower.
He could help her clean up the grime. He could help with everything.
The lights flickered on and off.
She wasn’t sure if that was part of the dream.
Then came the sounds, the rattling and buzzing. More flicking of the lights until they stayed on in a single, solid glare. The florescent ceiling panels illuminating every inch of what was once so mysterious and elusive, an empty autopsy room. It revealed the true dimensions, the architecture, everything accounted for. The operating table, the long countertop with the open cupboard doors. And the computer. She wasn’t brave enough to push open the door and see if anyone was still on the other side, but perhaps she could get help another way.
She stood and pushed off the wall, walking quickly toward an old desktop computer. A big white monitor was stacked on top of a horizontal computer case. There was a keyboard, a mouse, and a whole mess of wires. It took her a few minutes to attach everything correctly, especially finding the wall outlet for the ethernet cable. She let the machine boot up while she continued her search.
So what was she going to do?
Send an email?
If she could log into the hospital website, there was a customer relations live chat available. She could open that, get a receptionist on the line, and go from there.
She thought over the words she would use, how she’d describe the situation, what room she was in. A gross fucking autopsy room.
“Listen, I’m in this fucking room. And there’s this fucking guy . . .”
Slow down . . .
And did she really need to curse so much?
Right when Fiona had it all figured out, a bunch of words flashed onto the computer screen. It looked like . . .
Fuck!
It looked like gibberish. A command-line interface she’d never used before.
There was a blinking cursor. And a question.
She relaxed slightly, seeing that it was just a login screen. She’d used one every day at the nurses’ station. It was a different interface, but she could always just try her usual login and password.
Fiona typed in her name and then pressed the tab key to move the cursor to the password box, where she typed in 7cherrycola7.
She pressed enter.
The screen blinked away for a millisecond, only to return with another text-filled screen.
It might not be as simple as she had thought, starting a chat, sending an email. Anything. She was probably better off down the drain pipe with her rescue rat.
She scrolled through her options, most of it still sounding like gibberish, when she came upon another login screen. This time it was for something called Environment. Temperature controls for the morgue. And then she remembered something Jasper had told her about their cybersecurity efforts, and how access points were being live monitored.
So if she could pretend she was a hacker . . .
That was giving herself too much credit.
But if she could at least keep failing the login process with wrong passwords, it might at least raise some red flags upstairs.
What else was there to do?
Fiona mashed the keys and failed the login as many times as she could, over and over again until her fingers started cramping. Almost sinking to the floor in tears, she forced her fingers to move again, typing out one last word.
27
Jasper
Jasper tapped the side of the prince’s bed, his hand thudding lightly on the metal rail. “You have nothing to worry about,” he said in Arabic. “You’ll be in excellent hands.”
“God willing,” the prince said in English.
Jasper stepped away and found Mr. Awadi, nodding confidently to him.
But the prince’s handler didn’t look as confident. “He has everything in the world to worry about,” said Awadi. “By the looks of things here. What could happen next? Infection from a doctor who doesn’t wash his hands?”
Jasper smiled. “No.”
“Or maybe the doctor did wash his hands, but the soap wasn’t soap and instead it was—”
“He’s a very lucky man,” Jasper interrupted. “To have made it this far . . . He has luck on his side.”
“He has God on his side,” said Mr. Awadi, closing his eyes and bowing his head.
“Allahu Akbar,” Prince Saif said weakly from his bed.
And then the room filled with a chorus of Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, with all the Saudi guests joining in, the music of their appeals rising and falling like a round of cicadas. Jasper bowed politely and left the room as the last of the cicadas fizzled out.
“Jackson told me to talk to you.”
It was Sam, the super recognizer. He had his tie in his hands, rolling it around his finger like a little kid would.
“Talk to me about what?”
“About what to do,” said Sam. “I mean, I know what to do . . . but—”
“Have you gone over the whole roster?”
Jasper had created a yearbook-style page of everyone who would be present during the operation, all of their high-res color photos for Sam’s savant-like abilities to keep, organize, and recall. The prince didn’t need to have any strange faces in the operating room.
“I’m still waiting for the rest,” Sam said.
“That was it.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah,” said Jasper. “What, you wanted to show off?”
“I’m just used to a lot more faces.”
“Remind me to take your number when this is all done. I’ll take you to Vegas.”
Sam scratched at his temple. “Why Vegas?”
Jasper shrugged. “You know . . .”
“It doesn’t work for cards.”
“Oh. I thought, you know . . .”
“Can we get back on topic?”
“Yeah,” said Jasper. “We probably should.”
Sam looked around, crossed and then uncrossed his arms, and leaned close to Jasper. He whispered, “There’s been a gentleman.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve seen a gentleman quite frequently walking by the room, always looking in. And he seems very much out of place.”
Jasper checked the hall, both ways, although he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. He just knew that he felt a sudden creeping paranoia.
Sam kept up with the whispering. “For one, he shouldn’t necessarily be up here on this floor. I’ve found his photo in the security directory. He’s a lab technician. Victor Demidov.” Sam pulled a phone from his pocket and started thumbing the screen. “So, unless he’s got a sick friend or some nurse up here he keeps visiting . . .” Then Sam turned the phone to Jasper, showing a staff photo of Mr. Demidov. “Ever seen this guy?”
Squarish head. Widow’s peak. Upper lip that hung over the bottom.
“No.”
“He’s also out of place because of the way he moves,” said Sam. “The way he looks. His behaviors. Everything.”
“Is he Russian?”
Sam winced. “Is Victor Demidov Russian?”
“I mean, how Russian? Does he speak it?”
“I’ve never heard him speak.”
“Hmm.” Jasper tapped his foot. It was good timing, hearing about this lab technician.
“Well?” said Sam.
“I was just about to head down there. I’ve got some samples to analyze.”
“Yeah?” said Sam. “And?”
“Let me know if you see him around.”
“Yeah,” Sam grunted. “Anything else?” The guy had horrible social skills.
“Sure,” said Jasper. “What’s my body language saying?”
“You want to hit me.”
Jasper laughed. “You know, you’re pretty good at this.”
Victor Demidov was nowhere to be found on the lab floor, so Jasper went ahead with his work, running tests on the contents of blood bags and IV solutions lined up for the surgery. There was no such thing as being too careful. Midway through the process, he got the
call from Jackson about a thwarted entry into one of the building’s environmental control systems.
“Someone tried the password over a hundred times,” Jackson said. “In the old morgue.”
“That’s interesting.” Jasper’s eyes glanced through a chemical analysis of one of his samples. He had too much work to do.
“Interesting?”
He picked up another page, looking for the item number and then matching it with one of the blood bags. Check and recheck. “Can’t you get someone else? I’ve got these fluids to clear, and then I have to run them upstairs for the surgery.”
“You’re closer.”
“The surgery is closer. It’s in fifteen minutes.”
“The morgue is two floors below you,” said Jackson.
Jasper tossed one of the pages aside. “A rat walked across the keyboard.”
“A hundred times?”
“Two rats. They’re fucking.”
“Then I want to know what kind of rats they were,” said Jackson. “Go check on it.”
At that moment, no amount of password fails in an old basement morgue could distract him from what was most important—making sure that anything that might potentially be used or injected into the prince was safe and untampered with. However, the sight of Vic was a distraction that he couldn’t ignore. Jasper could see him in the corner of his eye, crisscrossing a hallway, rushing in and out of two rooms, their doors slamming shut each time. The lab technician looked just as he did in the photos, only more bug-eyed, pale and squirrely. And he was now pushing a trolley carrying several boxes, wheeling it quickly in and out of the rooms.
As Jasper finished up his current sample, he kept looking up at the latest door Vic had exited, waiting for Vic to return. When he was satisfied that he wouldn’t, Jasper made his way to the door with a casual stroll, like he not only belonged there in the lab, but that he belonged inside that very door.
Only he didn’t. It was locked.
“Hey, Jackson,” he said into his phone while reading the room number on a small placard near the door. “Any chance I can get access to LT303?”
“No,” said Jackson. “That’s not on the morgue level.”
A moment later, after some mild arguing with Jackson, and after Jasper’s swipe badge had been updated with an expanded allowance, and after that swipe badge triggered a green light above the lock, the door finally opened into a small, dim office. The lights were off, but there was a small desktop lamp which gave off a low reddish glow, giving Vic’s personal office the coziness of a bedroom. There were family photos on the desk, personalized knickknacks like Matryoshka doll paperweights and dog-eared concert tickets held up on a metal filing cabinet by takeout pizza magnets. There was also a harsh chemical smell. It reminded Jasper of the battlefield. A burnt-hair type smell. He found the source in the corner of the room, where several buckets and plastic soda bottles stood. There was foil folded over the tops of the bottles. It didn’t look like hospital lab work. It looked more like something from the pages of The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
Leaving the room and then quickly returning with a hypodermic needle and a sample vial, Jasper carefully collected a small sample of the dark, noxious liquid. He brought it out of the dark office and into the brightly lit, sterile lab area, and to his current workstation where he pushed aside his blood samples to make room for a potentially more important experiment.
Before entering the sample into the analysis machine, Jasper tried a low-fi, human analysis first, wafting the vial near his face and taking a slow, careful inhalation through his nose.
Ammonia.
He put down the vial and turned off the machine, capping the syringe and pocketing it before heading back to Vic’s lair of an office. The analysis machine would take more time than he had. His time, that narrow sliver of minutes between blood samples and checking on some computer in the morgue, only allowed for blind and unscientific rummaging through drawers and boxes. He started with a wire metro rack, checking for containers of whatever chemicals Vic had been mixing. Ammonia nitrate, perhaps. Nitroglycerin. Something obvious that would just scream the intentions of a bomb-making terrorist. But it was all harmless stuff. Old binders of chemical analysis sheets, hypoallergenic latex gloves, card stock, old takeout menus.
In a shoebox he found a bunch of loose nails, the box almost half full of them, loose, heavy, and sliding around. Why would a lab technician have so many nails? For the family portraits on his office wall? Or for stuffing into small lengths of pipe as shrapnel?
Jasper tried to put the office back to how he’d found it, but gave up the process when Jackson called again. There was more activity in the morgue. He should have been on his way there. Where the hell was he?
But Jasper changed the subject. “Jackson? Do we have bomb-sniffing dogs?”
There was a slight pause from Jackson. And then he said, “Not yet.”
28
Fiona
She might die in there. Starvation. Dying in a morgue. She thought about the pointlessness of it, the arc of her life. The victories, disappointments. Everything, good or bad, which had led her to this exact spot, huddled against the wall in a morgue autopsy room. The location for countless autopsies, for innumerable revelations of each cadaver’s cause of death. Mysteries released through the cutting of skin and bone.
What would be her cause? Lack of water? Lack of sunlight?
Or perhaps lack of oxygen, the old musty air of the sealed autopsy room becoming increasingly stuffy and noxious. And maybe even toxic. There were cleaning solutions, the harshest of them still remaining after months. There were perhaps embalming and preserving fluids. Maybe that was how she’d die, being preserved alive, her body pickling itself so that not even rats would be interested in the snack.
She had tried the computer again, not exactly sure of what she’d done. She hoped the login was for something important, something that could attract attention. She tried digging further, trying to access something more sensitive than temperature controls, when she felt the floor rumble gently beneath her feet. There was the sound of distant thunder. And then silence.
She’d been at work for hundreds of storms in the past, but none of the thunder sounded—or felt—like this. Granted, she hadn’t been locked away in a basement. She tried to imagine the outside world, beyond the hospital, the wind rushing through trees and overturned leaves, the sky darkening, the air cooling. Another ripple of thunder helped Fiona picture the scene on the street, the wind whipping through narrow valleys of skyscrapers, pedestrians rushing about to safety under awnings or some umbrellas, before a wall of rain swept in.
She sat back down against the wall, imagining the rain. How it might feel on her bare face if she were only a few dozen feet further up. Or if she were a few years younger, back in Iowa, before the necessity for work took hold of her life, and before her sister’s terrible accident took hold of hers. A time when they’d rush out into the street together, into the rain, stomping in puddles, the sky darkening above, the night approaching . . .
Just as Fiona had imagined the place where she was reunited with her sister, the old Iowa home or perhaps the afterlife, the lights in the morgue flickered out. And she was alone again. No more rain, or puddles, or rumbling thunder. Just a dark room without her sister. For the rest of her life.
What was there to do, other than just sit there against the wall? She’d already tried everything she could in the light. Now in the dark she felt as close as ever to a contentment. A quiet resignation. And something else, something cool and otherworldly. A feeling of death, washing over her. It was an icy touch, as if somebody from the operating table had reached over and draped a wet and frail hand down to her shoulder. Or some ghost, her sister perhaps, returning to her, sitting next to her.
And then talking to her.
Get up.
A voice from deep inside her, a vibration gurgling up through her spine and into her brain stem, buzzing there like a trapped bee.
; Get up and get ready.
She could feel the message more than hear it, its intent welling up into her skull until she felt the pressure, a great force trying to explode out of her forehead.
Get up!
Fiona got up.
She walked forward, freely. No hands in front to protect her, no wondering where she was in the dark room. She walked directly to the operating table, her hand sliding out through the darkness until she felt the hard metal rim of the paint can. And then the handle. She gripped it, and then lifted the paint can off the table, the weight of it rocking back and forth. A nice, full can. She liked how heavy it felt, moving her arms, letting it swing back and forth with its tiny metal squeaking sounds.
Use it.
She could use it. Paint a little picture in the dark, something desperate and primal and on the wall like cave markings. “I was here.” Or she could keep all the paint inside, every useful ounce of it, every bit of weight behind whatever swing was necessary against whatever foe . . .
When she heard the sound of an elevator door shutting, she knew she’d made the right decision—not only in grabbing the paint can, but in holding in every bit of its weight. She would need everything she could muster.
With the can dangling and swinging, Fiona rushed to where she knew the door was. She had been in the room long enough for the mental picture to stick, burning into her mind like the after-effects of staring at some bright light that had just gone out, the room and its dimensions existing in her mind as easily as if she had night-vision goggles. Her wit and concentration had been collected, her thoughts quieted and streamlined, her will immovable, her grip tightening on the paint can handle as she waited against the wall. She was standing where the door would swing open, her foot sticking out so that she could feel just exactly where it was, so she could know exactly when and where to lean out around the door and swing the paint can with as much force as she could.
The sounds in the hall grew louder as her body stiffened, her muscles aching with adrenaline. She was no longer the meek victim, but an ice-veined predator, the throbbing embodiment of vengeance. And she wanted her attacker to return. Come try the door. Come try her.
DARC Ops: The Complete Series Page 62