Soon. It had to be soon.
Gulping air, hiccupping, Gillian went straight to the telephone and sat hunched over it, her mind momentarily a blank. Voices outside brought her around; she was afraid someone would come in. There was no man to call, as Peter had hoped; but all her life when she’d most needed help she’d been able to depend on Mrs. Busk, the Bellavers’ housekeeper. It was New Year’s Eve, but Mrs. Busk would be at home with her hair in rollers, waiting for Guy Lombardo on TV. Once alerted and aroused she had the moxie to drive straight to the hospital, strong-arm her way inside, and take her Gilly home.
Over everyone’s dead body, if it came to that.
Chapter Eleven
In the hallway near Gillian’s door Peter encountered a handful of middle-aged and elderly patients standing in groups clucking about the blood on the floor or complaining of interrupted rest. Farther down the hall, at the end of the wing where the trouble seemed to be, two women had their arms around another, immensely broad woman who was pulsating with terror and trying to faint.
“Father, where have the floor nurses gone?”
“Father, there’s a woman in that room down there … just awful …”
“I know, I know,” Peter said. “You can all be most helpful now by going back to your rooms and staying there. It appears we have a maniac on the loose.”
His warning emptied the halls even faster than he’d anticipated. Except for a man with a surgical neck brace who kept moving, doggedly, with the aid of a walker, toward the nurses’ station. He had that old soldier look.
Peter said, “Colonel?”
“Brigadier.”
“Where are you going, sir?”
“Been trying to raise someone on the bloody blower in my room. No luck, New Year’s Eve, entire infirmary has gone to pot tonight. I’ll just try the telephones at the service desk.”
“Those phone lines have been cut, sir.”
“Have they? What do you know about it?”
“Brigadier, I could use your help. We may still be able to do something for the woman. Would you follow me please?”
Peter didn’t wait for him; a couple of doors were quickly closed along the hall as he ran toward room 819. He glanced at the nameplate on the door. MCCURDY, IRENE C.
She was a flaccid thing on the bed, minus the considerable weight of approximately five quarts of blood. There was a bright, bouffant, artificial-looking arrangement of hair that didn’t go with the stone-gray and shrunken face. Her teeth were bared in an expression of utter distaste. The room was like a greenhouse. The reek of blood, still dripping stringily from bed to floor, had Peter holding his breath. As far as he could tell it had all drained out of Irene McCurdy somewhere below the waist, probably under more pressure than the normal pumping action of the heart would provide. Area of recent surgery? Peter couldn’t make himself go and look.
As he’d expected, there was no sign of Dr. Irving Roth. The doctor had left a partial footprint at the edge of the slowly spreading, viscous pool where he’d walked on his way to the bed. Gillian had made long sliding tracks. She’d slipped and sprawled and finally made it out of the room on her hands and knees.
Peter heard the creaking of the walker, the old soldier’s rasping breath behind him.
“Extraordinary. It was like this in the trenches, you see. Very bad in the trenches. All those marvelous lads.”
“Yes, sir. I’m going for help. Don’t let anyone disturb this room.”
“Haven’t you a ritual to perform, Chaplain?”
“It’ll keep.”
Peter made some vital calculations as he went down the hall. Time of Roth’s arrival on the eighth floor, approximately ten thirty. By the wall clock at the nurses’ station it was now ten forty-seven. Peter felt a little stunned. The stairwell door closed behind him; he went up three steps at a time, carrying his black bag.
So he’d spent nearly a quarter of an hour with Gillian Bellaver. During that time Roth had investigated Irene McCurdy’s condition. It could have taken him all of thirty seconds to establish that there was nothing to be done. Then, if he was any kind of medical man, he would spend a minute or two longer puzzling over probable cause, before the animal alarm reminded him he’d better set about saving his own skin. He needed the kind of muscle that could handle Peter Sandza, armed and known to be exceedingly dangerous. He’d looked at the telephone, hesitated, and run like hell.
To the elevators? No. There were only two elevators for Herlands North; one had been on the blink for a while. Tough to get it repaired during the holidays. Hester, who had gone over the hospital with care while plotting Peter’s Outs, had timed the service provided by the remaining elevator. Average off-peak waiting time was three minutes twenty seconds. If Roth had hung around punching buttons for any length of time on his arrival at the hospital, he’d remember and shun the elevator as a means of escape.
Which left the stairs. Up or down? Considering that fat Rothie had a weight problem, he’d find it a lot easier going down. Seventh floor? No, the good doctor would be anxious to put as much distance between himself and Peter as he could.
So jog down to six or even five, and run to the nurses’ station. Arrive more than a little out of breath, and identify yourself, and tell them there’s trouble up on eight, get some help quick. Dial main-floor security. One man on duty in the guardhouse by the doors, and he can’t leave. Activate the pocket-pager and locate old Fred. Retired cop, of course. Maybe, just maybe, Fred would call in right away. Get in touch with a Dr. Roth at the station on six, Fred. Bzzz, bzzz. “Security. You called?”
Elapsed minimum time, say five minutes. Eight at the outside. Clock time, ten thirty-eight.
But it had been at least ten forty-five when he’d left Gillian’s room. By that time Fred should have been on hand, supported by a contingent of security men from other sections of the hospital, maybe even NYPD if a unit was near enough. All of them leveling guns at the door waiting for him to emerge. Peter could picture Irving Roth lurking somewhere in the background, a sickly expectant grin on his face.
Roth hadn’t notified hospital security after all.
Possibly he’d been so frightened he’d kept right on running to the nearest exit, claimed his car and was half way home by now, the sweat running down his spine like ice-water.
Peter rejected the idea; it didn’t jibe with his on-the-run, paranoid sense of the fitness of things.
Suppose there was someone else Roth could call on in an emergency. Not plodding ex-cops or nervous young security-trainee machos stuck with the undesirable New Year’s Eve duty, but an elite force, men who could sift buildings and whole neighborhoods through a fine-mesh screen, allowing nothing to escape.
Oh, yes, Peter thought. He liked that.
If it was true, as Roth had claimed (and there had to be a grain of truth in the man somewhere), that he hadn’t known of Gillian’s whereabouts until tonight, then it made sense to assume Childermass had encouraged the doctor to drop by and see her. And Childermass would easily have made an important connection. Gillian at the ice rink in Central Park, Peter there on the same afternoon. Therefore it was not unreasonable to believe that Peter knew all about Gillian, and would be combing hospitals looking for her. Worthwhile assigning men to the Washington Heights hospital, just in case.
Roth had located the MORG Principal, and he had confirmed Peter’s presence.
They had to be at work even now, quietly and meticulously, closing all the Outs, but not in such a way as to communicate the faintest tremor of activity to Peter. They would stay low and wait, then do it with a big bang if necessary, sweetening at leisure.
Peter had momentary misgivings about Gillian’s future. But if she’d paid attention and did just as he said, probably she was in no immediate danger from Roth or MORG itself. The Bellaver name and the power of their wealth would make even Childermass cautious about how he approached her.
It might help Gillian to ease on out of the hospital if he made an uncustom
arily noisy exit himself, at the same time drawing off much of the strength of the MORG teams on hand.
Easy to draw them off; very likely impossible to get rid of them once he had.
Take a little time to think about that problem on the long way down.
He had reached the tenth and top floor of Herlands Pavilion. There was a sign on the door. Red letters. NO ACCESS. CONSTRUCTION STILL IN PROGRESS ON THIS FLOOR. Metal-clad door painted gray, impressive-looking lock. It wasn’t as good as it looked, if you knew just which tools to bring. He opened his black bag. Penlight, lock picks. Twenty seconds, silently jiggling tumblers, and he was on the other side of the stairwell door. He closed it carefully behind him.
Colder here. The surgery floor was ninety percent completed, even the exit lamps were all in place. The red glow provided enough light for Peter to ease his way around the piles of builder’s remnants. He had the Beretta automatic in his hand. They hadn’t started to move in the complicated machinery yet, and only half the tiles were laid along the floor in front of him.
He was beginning to feel sick to his stomach again. Not from fear, exactly, but from a suffocating sense of déjà vu. Once again the nightmare scramble to avoid the Pit, each time coming closer to sliding in, falling headlong in the dark Forever.
So if you’re afraid of the Pit, the thing to do is climb right in to show your contempt. Of the Pit, and the locking-tight terror it inspires.
Anyway, the roof was no longer a possibility. The simplest Out of all to cover, once they were on the alert.
Peter had a small pry bar with him, but someone had left a larger one on a partly dismantled packing crate near the elevators. He used both tools to open the doors of elevator One. He made some unavoidable noise getting them apart, but the sound of elevator Two falling in its shaft was enough to obscure the clanking of the pry bars and the rolling-back of the doors on the tenth floor.
With the aid of the pencil flashlight he took a sighting on the cables in the center of the shaft. Because of the oversized hospital elevators they were a little farther away than he’d counted on, but the cables looked relatively unused, not dangerously slicked from grease and wear. He didn’t look down at all. Yesterday the elevator had been in the basement, bunches of wires dangling from its control panel. It had better still be there.
Peter tucked the flashlight away and took a pair of black leather driving gloves from his bag. He’d spent more than an hour on the gloves after Hester had purchased them, gluing and sanding with care. Climbing straight down a hundred and ten feet of rope was no great accomplishment if you knew the technique and had the stamina; climbing the same number of feet on braided steel elevator cable verged on the suicidal. On the taut cable he wouldn’t get much help from his feet in braking the descent. Almost all of his weight would be pulling at his gloved hands. And he couldn’t predict how long the sandpaper grip would last. If the gloves wore slick midway on the cable, then he would ride it smoking to the roof of the elevator below, hitting the roof with enough impact to drive pelvic bone fragments through a lot of irreplaceable soft tissue. He had made a clip-on strap for the bag, which fitted snugly enough under his left arm. He waited until his eyes had adjusted to the available light. The faint gleam of the cables was just visible in the shaft. He couldn’t rely on depth perception. Elevator Two was now rising in the adjoining shaft, its machinery humming.
Peter stepped to the lip of the shaft opening. The black bowling shoes he wore gave him a soft sense of contact with the steel plate, but he would have preferred to do this in his bare feet. He hooked the fingers of his left hand in the horizontal door slot and leaned out, reaching with his right hand. He touched one of the cables and held on and then, grunting, let go with his left hand and pushed off like a circus flyer on his way to a triple somersault. He brought his feet up until he was nearly parallel to the drop; simultaneously his left hand crossed his body to the wire. He enjoyed a half second’s weightlessness while he set his grip, but brute anxiety caused him to cling too tightly, and the sandpaper surface of the driving gloves worked very well.
As Peter swung around the cable with enough momentum to wrench his arms from their sockets, he had the wits to keep his feet together, maintaining a precarious airy balance.
He loosened his grip just enough to compensate for the arc of his body and the tug of gravity and slipped a rocketing eight feet down the cable. Then he got the thin soles of the shoes on the wire for extra traction and came to a swaying stop, leaning back for balance. He breathed through his clenched teeth. Circus act. No applause please, save for the end.
Elevator Two had stopped on the eight floor. The doors opened, but Peter couldn’t hear voices. Strict discipline. MORG had come to sweep up. Distantly he heard the old brigadier calling for help.
Where are you, Gillian? Peter thought. It was drafty as a chimney where he was hanging, and the sweat of his armpits felt like chilled mercury, sliding in lazy droplets down his sides.
He started to lower himself. Hand over hand, a foot at a time.
In 612 Herlands West Father Karl Krasno sat nodding over his prayers, forgetting, in his weariness, some of the native tongue. He had hoped, by reciting Psalms in Czech, that he might get through to the man on the bed, but more likely it had been at least forty-eight hours since Jonas Krasno had paid attention to the sound of his brother’s voice, or to anyone’s voice. The hero-brother was just too far gone, yet the big chest, undiminished by the spreading rot inside, continued to heave as if under a ton of weight; he made each breath last an incredible minute or longer while he gathered strength to fight for another. Father Karl found it difficult to keep his mind on prayers while the struggle continued; even the private duty nurse in attendance at Jonas’s bedside was staring at him, gripping the arms of her chair as if the intensity of his desire to survive was consuming her as well.
Father Karl took off his glasses and poured a little cold water on a cloth, held it against his aching head. He smiled. Ah, but you should have seen him at his greatest, he thought. Thirty-eight, no almost thirty-nine years ago. He could still shudder at the memory of the Carpathian winter and their suffering as Jonas prodded them through waist-high drifts of snow. Nazi ski patrols everywhere. Jonas was sixteen but seasoned, fully a man. They were the children of Max Krasno, and so marked for death like the rest. The world remembers Lidice, but not Drbal. It was almost a hundred miles from their doomed Moravian village to the ruins of the Slovakian castle near Strecno in the Mala Fatra where they hoped to find a partisan group willing to take them in. A hundred miles of frostbite and starvation, no nourishment except stone-crop tea and a few bats Jonas had trapped in a cave and roasted like squab.
Yolande had died in Jonas’s arms only a few miles from the castle, a pathetic blue lump, in the torn fleece which he stripped from his own back in a last futile attempt to keep her warm. Despite the medicinal tea she coughed her lungs out, bits of bloody tissue at a time. Had Jonas accidentally smothered her, a hand over her face to muffle the sounds in the sifting-down night while spotlights raked the-trees? For almost a full day after they reached shelter he refused to let them take Yolande from him. Karl slept and slept, exhausted. On waking he attacked his big brother in a frenzy partly caused by fever. Yoan-ash! Yoan-ash! Why didn’t you save her?
He would never forget the look of bewilderment and anguish on Jonas’s face, the tears that didn’t quite flow. Bad luck, Karl. It was all Jonas said. The next day he went back to join the Resistance in Brno.
He killed a lot of Nazis in the war, perhaps some S.S. who had been responsible for the horror of Drbal.
Let me now make amends, Karl thought. He put down the cool cloth and reached for his glasses and the rosary of heavy handcrafted silver, a luxury that sometimes embarrassed him. His ordination gift from Jonas. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit …
But it had been longer than a minute since the last breath, almost two minutes. The nurse was standing beside the bed, a hand on Jon
as’s wrist. Karl rose wearily himself, unable to believe that it could be over. The nurse picked up the receiver of the telephone. Karl hesitated a few moments longer, his eyes on the motionless chest. Then he sighed and kneeled.
Lord, accept the soul of Thy repentant servant Jonas …
Jonas had performed his Act of Perfect Contrition several days ago, and he had received Extreme Unction, the Last Rites of the Church. Now there would be a wake for the few who cared to come, and a Mass for the Dead. In two days, three at the most, Father Karl could return to his parish duties in England.
The young resident doctor, a woman, was at bedside in under three minutes. She pronounced Jonas dead. Karl packed the reliquary and the eighteenth-century statue of St. Florian, patron saint of a once-formidable family now all but extinct, and went out into the hall.
Cosima was there, wiping tears from her cheeks. She had been waiting since two o’clock in the visitors’ lounge opposite the nurses’ station. She looked admirably fresh and resilient despite the tears, sustained, no doubt, by her dancer’s vitality.
“I know he didn’t want anyone to see him, but …”
Karl nodded. “He was your father. Go in.”
He waited for Cosima in the lounge. One of the floor nurses gave him a cup of coffee. When Cosima rejoined him she was more pale than before, but dry-eyed. She bummed a cigarette from Karl. They walked to the elevators.
“You must be starved,” she said.
“I’m all right.” His voice was hoarse from the hours of reading aloud. “A little sleepy.”
“A drink, then.”
“That would be welcome.”
“Would you like to spend the night? Jessica’s gone home for a brief visit. There’s plenty of room.”
“No, thank you, Cosima. I’m comfortable at the rectory. Tomorrow is a Holy Day of Obligation; I’m celebrating the six-thirty mass for Father Pannell.”
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