Blood Oath

by Linda Fairstein

  “Why not?” Mike said. I could hear the street noise in the background. “It might be the perfect moment to catch him off guard.”

  “Hurry up, then,” I said. “I’ll be waiting for you in Lucy’s room.”

  “I’d distance myself from Lucy, if I were you,” Mike said.

  “But why?” I asked. “She’s so vulnerable in all this.”

  “Exactly. But the man identifying himself also asked if you were here.”

  “He what?”

  “He asked the guard if you were sitting vigil with Francie.”

  If I hadn’t been scared until this moment, I was suddenly terrified.

  “If this man is looking for you, Coop, there are two possible reasons. He wants to do something evil to you, or he figures you’ve got Lucy in tow, here at the hospital. Either way, one or both of you are his targets. So find a way to split up as safely as you can. Backup teams are on the way from the nearest precinct. I’ll have you both covered, I swear it.”

  “How do I make Lucy safe?” I tried to blow off the fear and be useful to my young charge.

  “Figure it out, kid. Just don’t stop thinking,” Mike said. “It’s what you do.”

  I bit my lip and tried to clear my head.

  “Just stay low, do you hear me?” Mike said. He was breathing harder, as though he’d broken into a trot.

  I was standing still but I was breathing harder, too.

  “No one’s supposed to know we’re here, Mike,” I said. “That was the whole point of choosing this location—this little old hospital that no one seems to know exists.”

  “Let me deal with this guy at the gate and then I’m coming back to take you and Lucy out,” Mike said. “Your job is to keep your cool and do the right thing for Lucy. Then let’s blow this joint.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  I couldn’t leave Lucy alone. It was my fault we had her hidden here. I wanted to wait for Mike, but if this problem got away from him, I needed to be able to protect her, not abandon her.

  I kept my phone in my hand and walked into her room. She was lying down on her side, still glued to the TV.

  “Sorry to interrupt you, Lucy.”

  “Hmm?” she answered without looking up.

  “We’re going to be leaving here tonight, and going over to my place,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked. “Because that woman is dead?”

  Her voice was as flat as if she was talking to me about the television schedule.

  “How do you know about that woman? How did you find out anything about her?” I said, a bit too frantically for my own liking.

  Lucy just shrugged. “Those guys in the hall sometimes talked too loud,” she said. “It’s a hospital. You’ve got to expect that sometimes people die.”

  She didn’t seem to know there was any connection between the dead woman and herself. There weren’t many people who knew—yet—that Zach Palmer had subjected Francie Fain to the same kind of sexual assault as Lucy, sealing her silence, too, with a blood oath.

  “Mike’s going to be here shortly,” I said. “I’d like you to put your jeans on and your shoes, and get ready to go.”

  “But I have my own room in this place,” she said. “My own TV. Nobody makes me do anything that I don’t feel like doing here.”

  “I’ve got Netflix and Amazon Prime and a million stations you can watch,” I said, raising the tone of urgency in my voice. “Please just do as I say.”

  Lucy reluctantly stood up, slipped into her jeans, and bent over to put her shoes back on.

  Billy Feathers pushed open the door. “Did you get Mike?” he asked.

  “Yeah. He’ll be up as fast as he can.”

  “The guards should have been back here by now,” Billy said.

  We were looking at each other, both anxious and both confused about where the law enforcement security officers were.

  “How do you feel?” Billy asked. “I mean about being here?”

  “Lousy,” I said. “I want to go and I want to get Lucy out of the hospital.”

  Lucy was dressed now, standing beside her bed and listening to us.

  “Is there a back door?” I asked. “We could wait for Mike on the street.”

  “There’s only the ambulance bay, and I can’t operate that by myself.”

  “I can climb out windows,” Lucy said, seeming more eager than frightened.

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But they seem to either face the front of the hospital building, or they hang out over the East River.”

  Just then, a voice came on the loudspeaker in the hallway wall just outside Lucy’s room. We were all startled.

  “Code Violet. Code Violet. I repeat, Code Violet in first-floor restroom.”

  I knew enough about hospital protocol to know that Code Blue was a critical medical emergency, Code Red signified smoke or fire, and Code Black usually meant a bomb threat.

  Billy headed for the door.

  “What’s Violet?” I asked. “What does it mean?”

  “A combative situation,” he said. “It’s not about a patient condition. Someone’s fighting—or been injured.”

  “But the bathroom is where the two cops were dressing,” I said. “And they’re armed.”

  “Maybe they’re hurt,” Billy said. “I’ve got to help.”

  I grabbed Billy by both arms and squared off against him. “There are others to respond to that situation. You’ve got to help me get Lucy out of here,” I said. “Think of a way. Any way that avoids the front entrance and the elevator and the stairwell that leads to the lobby.”

  Billy inhaled and rubbed his eyes. “I can get you both safely to the security office, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Without using the elevator?” I asked. “Without going through the lobby and the front door?”

  I was as agitated as he was, but trying to stay solid for Lucy’s sake. Someone had killed Francie Fain and was perhaps after me as well. Lucy would be the next link in the deadly chain.

  “Yes,” Billy said. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “How will you go?” I asked.

  “Out the far end,” he said. “Opposite the direction of the elevator and the quarantined wing. We’ll go across the Bridge of Sighs, to the old Nurses’ Residence.”

  “You can get in?”

  “I’ve got the key,” he said, jingling the ring of keys on his belt. “Security’s on the ground floor of that building.”

  “Code Violet. Repeat, Code Violet,” the stern voice said, sounding a bit more urgent. “Code Violet on One West.”

  “Let’s hurry,” he said. “I want to get you out first, then go downstairs to help.”

  “If that’s what you need to do, Billy, I get it,” I said. “But I need to set up a ruse first, some way to hide Lucy as best I can. Someone may have figured out that I’m here, because of Francie, but Lucy has to stay out of sight.”

  “I understand,” Billy said.

  “Then let’s cross the hall.”

  “What?” Lucy asked.

  The corridor was still empty. I ran across and pushed open the door of the room where Francie Fain had been, when she was still alive and on life support. I motioned for Billy and Lucy to follow.

  There was a form under a sheet, lying atop a gurney, which was supposed to be a double for the body of Francie Fain. I pulled back the cover, revealing the anatomically correct blowup doll that had been placed there instead.

  I opened the closet door and stuffed the doll inside.

  “Lie down on the gurney,” I said to Lucy. “Stay as still as you can and close your eyes. It’s better than staring at the sheet I’m going to put over you.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Because I don’t know who’s in this hospital right now, and I don’t want anyone to
see you,” I said. “Now, lie down.”

  She did as she was told and I pulled the sheet up over her head.

  I wrapped the long green scrubs around myself and tied a knot in the front. I covered my blond hair with a cap and put the mask over my nose and mouth.

  “You take the lead, Billy,” I said. “When I open the door, head as quickly as you can to the Bridge of Sighs. No looking back.”

  I pulled on the door and stuck my head out. There was still no one on the hallway. To my right was the elevator and the quarantined wing. To my left was the solarium and exit to the Nurses’ Residence, which now housed the main security office three flights down.

  The Code Violet calls had stopped. I had no idea whether someone had been hurt and the situation resolved or not.

  “On the count of three,” I said, and when I got to three, Billy pulled and I pushed the gurney out into the hallway, brushing the edge of one of the chairs that the cops had been sitting in and steering it to the right.

  As we passed my room, Billy pulling the gurney from the front, I ducked in and grabbed the handful of syringes he had left behind, sticking them in my jeans pocket before I grabbed the foot of the gurney.

  We had only thirty feet to go, and no one in front of us to block the route.

  “If I don’t go all the way with you, Billy,” I said, “how else can I get out?”

  “But you have to come,” he insisted, turning his head to argue with me. “Both of you need to be safe.”

  “You’ve got to make Lucy safe with tonight’s security team,” I said. “That’s where Mike will go to get help. He wants us separated.”

  If someone was following me, I didn’t need to put Lucy in harm’s way.

  “I know there’s a way down, but I’m not sure where it goes out.”

  “Down?” I asked. “What do you mean? Out where?”

  “After we make the left turn here, the last doorway we pass after the bridge is a stairwell,” he said, half-turned again to face me. “If you go down below the first floor—starting here on three—to the basement level, it’s pretty rough but it will take you most of the way underground across the old campus, three blocks to the north.”

  “Rough?” I asked as we wheeled Lucy down the hall.

  “It was built a hundred years ago. It’s dark and narrow and filled with pipes overhead and on all sides.”

  “But you’ve done it? You can get through?”

  “You and anyone else,” Billy said. “About twenty feet in to the basement tunnel, there’s a small door to the left—at a break between the pipes—which will take you one flight further down. Think of it as a submarine—incredibly narrow and low and dark. A sub-basement that tracks the path above it, only most people don’t know it’s there because it’s unmarked.”

  “But you’ve been in it?” I asked, making sure it existed.

  “Once only, five years ago,” Billy said. “For an emergency tornado drill. But all we did was climb down the steps and go a few yards in, not the whole way, so I have no idea where that tunnel leads to.”

  “So that takes me to . . . ?”

  “I wish I could be sure, Alex,” Billy said. “It used to lead out to the river, in the early days, so hazardous materials could be loaded onto boats and floated away.”

  I was trying to absorb all of this. A sub-basement that sounded as claustrophobic as a submarine, leading away from this building but with destination uncertain, and once used for the transport of hazardous material.

  “You promise me you’ll stay with Lucy?” I whispered, hoping the young woman couldn’t hear over the rattling of the gurney.

  We had turned the corner, squeezed through the tall, leafy plants in the solarium, and rolled over the ghostly Bridge of Sighs. I took my last look down on the campus, to my left, hoping for a sighting of Mike, and then my eyes caught bright beams from the hunter’s moon lighting up the East River to my right.

  I saw the door that Billy wanted me to use. It was just steps before the one that he would use to take Lucy to security.

  Billy’s hand was steady as he put the key in the door to the old Nurses’ Residence and I gave the gurney one last push.

  A voice behind us—a woman’s voice—was yelling to us. I could hear her clearly although she wasn’t yet in sight.

  “Nurse! Hey, you! Nurse!” she screamed. “Stop, will you? I’m an agent, an FBI agent—you’d better stop right now.”

  I heard the door slam shut behind Lucy Jenner and Billy Feathers, and listened to him turn the lock. I stepped back and slipped into the adjacent stairwell, just as Billy had directed me to do, hoping that our pursuer didn’t see me separate from Billy and the gurney.

  I flattened myself against the wall, not daring to move. There were no locks on the stairwell doors. Hospital staff had to move around without being accidentally sealed off from one of the floors. I counted on the fact that our pursuer would occupy herself with attempting to follow the gurney, but that Billy and Lucy would lose her.

  The agent went running to the door Billy had exited and pulled on it repeatedly, but it didn’t give. Then she began banging on it, ordering him to open up, as she continued to pound on it and kick it.

  I used the noise of her pounding as cover, to allow me to circle down from the third-floor stairwell to the second, and on again to the first floor.

  I had my hand on the basement door when I heard her shout, again in vain, “Shit, you damn fool. Open this door right now.”

  I knew I had heard that voice before. The frustrated speaker was an FBI agent, albeit a retired one. Tough, smart, and fearless.

  She was Josie Breed, Zach Palmer’s body man.

  FORTY-NINE

  When the banging stopped, I heard footsteps running away from the door that Billy Feathers had taken Lucy through. Maybe Josie Breed was doubling back to check the patient’s room, where the gurney now holding Lucy had been minutes earlier—the gurney that Josie thought was holding Francie Fain.

  I was on the first floor of the stairwell, staring at the door that led to the grimy basement and the tiny confines below it.

  I speed-dialed Mike and got him on the first ring.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “It’s Josie Breed,” I said, without answering his question. I was breathing heavily, almost gasping between words. “It’s Zach Palmer’s body man who’s in here trying to hunt us down.”

  “I know that,” Mike said. “She’s Zach’s assassin.”

  That single word was heart-stopping.

  “Tell me where you are,” he demanded.

  “I sent Lucy off with Billy Feathers to security. You’ve got to make them safe,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘assassin’?”

  “Josie faked her way in tonight as an agent, just using her old badge and fake ID,” Mike said. “She killed the other agent—the real one—in the restroom at the hospital. Shot her twice in the head when her back was turned, with a silencer to muffle the noise.”

  That attack had set off the Code Violet we’d heard over the loudspeaker, I thought, covering my mouth with my hand.

  “Josie came there tonight to finish off Francie Fain,” Mike said, “and then double the stakes by getting you. Getting Lucy, too, if you have her here with you. The perfect trifecta.”

  “I was so careful,” I said, listening for any sounds from above, but hearing none. “How did she—?”

  “That was Zach here at the gate, pretending he was Francie’s father, to get them in,” Mike said. “Josie had his back, before she figured out the better trick to get in by pretending to be an agent. And she saw you when you walked Mercer out to his car.”

  “So I brought this down on myself?”

  “Josie also delivered the perfume bottle with the nerve agent to Francie Fain the day Francie was poisoned,” Mike said. “Short story is that Zach
and Francie ran into each other at that conference in England a few weeks back.”

  Of course they did, I thought. He had been in London on antiterrorist business. He’d be the first to know about the nerve agents that had been let loose by the Russians on British soil. I was furious.

  “They don’t sell nerve agents with the perfume at the duty-free shops at Heathrow,” I said. “How did Zach get his hands on it?”

  “Josie and her contacts in the evil empire,” Mike said. “She had a mole in Putin’s crew when she was legitimately with the feds. Now that the stuff is being used in England and Europe, she was able to smuggle out a small amount of the Kiss of Death poison.”

  How much was a small amount? How many people were still at risk, and was Lucy Jenner one of them? Was I? My head was spinning.

  “Where are you?” Mike asked again.

  “In the stairwell that leads down from the solarium,” I said. I didn’t tell him that my knees were shaking and that a terrible chill had seized me from head to toe.

  “I’m almost there, kid,” Mike said. “I’m coming to get you out. Just stay on the phone with me. Just keep talking so I know you’re okay.”

  I held the phone away and listened for footsteps in the corridor above me, but heard none.

  “But why would Zach want to kill Francie?” I asked. “Why, after all this time, and how do you know that?”

  I could hear that Mike was jogging, his feet pounding on the asphalt Rock U drive, coming up the hill from York Avenue, toward the hospital.

  “Francie took advantage of the meeting in England to confront Zach about what he had done to her so many years ago,” Mike said. “She even told him she was quitting her job to work for Corliss, and that she was having the judge’s baby.”

  My trip to get the Judge’s DNA hadn’t been in vain. Small victory on this high-stakes night.

  Mike kept talking to keep me with him. “Francie told Zach that she hadn’t been able to have a relationship with a man in all the decades since he had molested her, but that she was ready to go public with her story now.”