by Obsession
The people who were coming to watch over her and ultimately take her away with them.
Her brain—poor, gelatinous thing—seemed okay with that. But her body definitely was not.
In fact, every time she was faced with the imminent prospect of being tucked under the wing of Ed’s “people,” she about had a heart attack.
Hmm.
Maybe her body was trying to tell her something. The sudden ringing of the phone nearly made her jump out of her skin. She sat bolt upright, the sudden movement jerking her IV. A quick, sharp pain shot through her chest and her head went all woozy and the room did a little unexpected shape-shifting. Heart pounding, breathing hard, she stared at the suddenly out-of-focus phone like it was a rattlesnake shaking its booty right there on her bedside table.
It was on its fifth ring before she got it together enough to answer it.
“Katharine?” This time she recognized the voice: Ed. “I just got off the phone with Starkey. He and Bennett are down in the hospital lobby right now, talking to a couple of cops who were asking for your room number at the reception desk. They’re detectives, and they want to talk to you about what happened last night.” There was the briefest of pauses. The volume of his voice dropped a degree. “Are you alone?”
“Y-yes.” It was all she could do to keep her voice steady. For whatever reason, the knowledge that his “people” were on the premises set her nerves to janglingbig-time. And never mind that she knew that, technically, she could be considered one of his “people,” too. After all, he was her boss, her mentor, her lover …
Why did the thought make her go cold all over?
“Okay, listen: When you talk to the cops, I don’t want you to tell them what I said about this maybe being some kind of insider job. No need to bring this circling back around to the Agency if we can help it. As far as public consumption goes—and that includes cops—this was a home break-in gone bad, plain and simple. They were after jewelry that they thought you had on the premises. Things got out of hand, and your friend got killed. Got that?”
Oh, yeah, I got it: You want me to lie to the police. But she didn’t say it aloud. Once again, that big yellow cautionlight in her mind that seemed to be her primary reactionto Ed flashed on, bright as the sun.
“Whatever you say,” she said. And didn’t know whether to hate herself or congratulate herself for how meek she sounded.
“That’s my girl.” He sounded transparently relieved. “Anyway, now that I think about it, I feel it’s quite possiblethe break-in may have been about that jewelry after all. There were some valuable stones in that set. Anyway, I’ll tell Starkey to try to head them off at the pass if he can. But if he can’t, you just stick to the jewelryscenario.”
“Okay.”
“I’m flying out of here in an hour. I should be back in D.C. late tonight. I’ll see you then, or at the latest tomorrowmorning.”
“Okay.”
“Love ya, babe,” he said just as he had before, and hung up without waiting for her to reply.
Katharine was left to slowly put the receiver down. She felt as shaky as Jell-O in an earthquake. Her heart pounded so hard that she could practically feel it gyratingagainst her breastbone. Her blood thundered in her ears. Her muscles were tense, her breathing came quick and shallow, and—she discovered as she finally let go of the receiver—her hand shook.
She had to think, quick. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Her brain was definitely not firing on all cylinders.In fact, she had just enough reasoning ability left to realize that she couldn’t depend on her reasoning abilityat all.
Two men tried to kill me last night.
That was one thing she knew for sure.
Who were they?
Now that she didn’t know. Except that they were probably spooks. Professionals. Covert-operations types.
Like the kind of men who routinely worked for Ed.
Ed, who wanted her to lie to the police. Ed, who knew perfectly well that whatever those thugs had been after, it sure as hell wasn’t jewelry, no matter how hard he was now trying to make her think otherwise.
The thought of Ed made her tremble. The thought of his “people” made her want to crawl under the bed and hide. He spoke of Starkey and Bennett as if she should know who they were. But she didn’t. She didn’t have a clue.
But that was a problem for later. The problem of the moment was that they were on their way up to her room now.
And every instinct she possessed screamed run.
5
With her brain on the fritz, her instincts were all she had left. She had to go with them. But there was a problem: She was in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV drip. With assorted physical injuries. And a mental state that gave a whole new meaning to the phrase dazed and confused.
The thing was, Starkey and Bennett could come bursting through the door at any minute.
At the thought, panic assailed her, and that decided the issue right there. Without knowing more about what was going on than she did, she wasn’t about to trust herselfto them, no way, nohow. That being the case, she had to get herself gone, now, whatever it took. Hands unsteady,pulse pounding a mile a minute, doing her best to ignore the throbbing pain in her head and the lesser ache in her ribs, she threw back the bedclothes, swung her feet over the edge of the bed, and stood up.
“Oh, crap.” She said it aloud as her knees gave way.
If she hadn’t managed to grab the IV pole for support,she would have gone down like a rock in a pond and it would have been all over right there. Fortunately, hanging on to the slightly wobbly pole was enough to keep her upright. Her head swam. Her ribs ached. Her legs continued to threaten to buckle. The room tilted dizzily before her eyes. Clutching the slender metal pole so hard that fluid sloshed in the plastic bag suspended from it, she locked her knees, stiffened her spine, and stayed on her feet by what was pretty much sheer force of will.
Whew.
So far, so good. At least she was standing.
Being tethered to the damned IV was an obstacle, that was for sure. But a glance down confirmed what she had suspected from the get-go from its unfortunate tendency to tilt: It had wheels. Four of them, to be precise.
Thank God for small blessings.
Moving carefully lest her knees betray her again, pushing the IV pole in front of her and using it as a supportto help her stay on her feet, she shuffled toward the door as quickly as her protesting muscles would permit. The industrial gray linoleum was cool beneath her bare feet. A gust from the air-conditioning goosed her through the open back of her hospital gown. The thought of appearing in the open corridor with her backside flapping in the breeze was briefly daunting, but the alternative was far worse. She didn’t know which floor she was on, but she did know that there were elevators to reach it. Starkey and Bennett could be on her floor even now, heading for her room. And if they weren’t yet, they would be soon.
Her heart pounded at the thought. Her blood ran cold. Her breathing quickened. Forget hospital-gown embarrassment: She would run naked through Yankee Stadium in the middle of the World Series if it would get her safely away from them.
Only vaguely aware of the tingling of her skin as goose bumps sprang to life along her too-bare flesh, she took a moment she very much feared she didn’t have to pause with one hand on the knob and press her cheek to the cool metal door, listening intently for any sound from the corridor. Holding her breath, jittery as a cat in a kennel full of dogs, she forced herself to wait and listenfor at least a ten-count. To have Ed’s “people” catch her in the act of fleeing her room would not, she felt, be a good thing. Better to skitter back to bed and try to delay her release from the hospital for as long as possibleif that scenario seemed inevitable. But if she did that, she would to all intents and purposes be putting herself in their custody—which translated to “at their mercy.” The thought made her throat contract and her stomach tie itself into a big, painful knot. Precisely why, she didn’t know, but the fear she felt was
unmistakable.
Chalk it up to those instincts of hers again, having their say.
Unfortunately, besides the hum of the air-conditioningand the pounding of her own heart, she couldn’t hear a thing.
Maybe there was nothing to hear.
On that optimistic note, she pulled the door open a few inches, peering around it out into the hall. It was, as far as she could see, empty.
So go for it already.
Taking a deep breath, she did, stepping out into the beige-walled passage, pushing the IV ahead of her, wincing at the squeaky clatter of its wheels. It turned out, she saw with one quick wild glance around, that she was only two doors away from the end of the hallway— and a red exit sign marking a door that led, presumably, to the fire stairs. The nurses’ station was perhaps fifty feet away in the opposite direction, opening off the middleof the corridor like a giant room without walls. At the nurses’ station, a gray-haired man in scrubs stood with his back to her, talking with a brown-haired woman in white lab coat as he tapped an impatient fingeron a manila folder that was spread out in front of them on the tall blue counter. A black woman in scrubs—presumably the same one who had taken her blood pressure not long before—pushed a rattling cart down the opposite end of the corridor. She, too, had her back to Katharine.
The elevators—there were four of them—were locatedin the wall directly opposite the nurses’ station. Katharine knew, because even as her gaze touched on and identified the nurse with the cart, one of the elevatorswent ping.
Uh-oh, company.
Her eyes shot toward the sound, located the elevators,and then she watched in frozen horror as the doors of the second one from the left started to slide open, revealinga widening view of a man in a dark suit.
Her heart lurched.
Starkey. Or Bennett. She didn’t know which, but then, it didn’t really matter. Because behind him stood anotherman in a dark suit. Why she was so sure it was them she couldn’t have said—okay, so maybe it was the whole hands-clasped-in-front-of-them, feet-planted-apart,wearing-sunglasses-in-an-elevator thing they had going on—but she was sure and the conviction was galvanizing.
I am outta here.
Grabbing her pole, lifting it right up off the floor so that the wheels wouldn’t squeak and give her away, she turned and fled through the fire door.
As she had suspected, it led to an emergency stairwell.Thank God. She was across the landing and on her way down before the door had finished closing behind her. It was warmer in the stairwell, presumably because the self-closing doors blocked a lot of the air-conditioning.The cinder-block walls were painted a soft sage green. The handrail was smooth polished steel, cool to the touch and fortunately—because she was of necessityleaning heavily on it—very sturdy. The stairs were uncarpeted concrete. A flight of ten or so steps led from another landing above her down to where she had enteredthe stairwell, and in the slanted ceiling above her head there was evidence of more steps leading upward from that landing to the next floor. The flight of stairs she was chugging down led to another landing from which there was no exit, where the steps reversed directionsand continued to descend, hopefully to a landing with an exit.
Faster. Faster. Faster.
Breathless with exertion, Katharine made it to the first landing and kept on going. It was tricky, because she was light-headed and her knees were unreliable and she had to plant the IV pole carefully on every step to keep it from rolling off and taking her with it to disaster.Sweating bullets, holding on to the rail for all she was worth, she cast numerous fearful looks behind her at the solid metal door, which thankfully remained firmly closed. She was on step number four from the next landing—the one that, indeed, had an exit—when she heard the muffled slap of a quartet of leather-soled shoes approaching along the corridor from which she had just escaped.
Starkey. Bennett.
Her eyes widened. Her breathing suspended. She glanced desperately—and uselessly—up at the closed door. If it was indeed them—and she felt in her gut that it was—they should be in her room in a matter of seconds.How long would it then take before they worked out that she was missing? If she was lucky, they might think she was in the bathroom… .
Yeah, right. She might not remember much about herself, but she knew this: She was never that lucky. Anyway, the bathroom door had been open. She rememberedseeing it standing ajar as she left her room.
Crap again.
It was a pain not having a functional brain. Coming up with a plan above and beyond run didn’t seem like it was going to happen anytime soon. In that case, the only thing to do was to go with what she was already doing. Working the IV unit like a ski pole, supporting herself with the handrail on the other side, she feverishly swung on down the stairs.
“Hey—nurse!”
The shout from the hallway above made her jump, which was a bad thing in that it almost caused her to lose her footing and butt-bump down the rest of the steps. Only her grip on her trusty IV pole saved her. The voice was a man’s, the tone imperative, as if he was used to being promptly attended to. From the take she got on the location of it, she was very much afraid that the speaker was yelling from the doorway of her abandonedroom.
Yikes. She was willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that it was Starkey. Or Bennett.
The IV pole clattered onto the landing, and she was right behind it.
“Nurse!”
It was the same voice as before, but she didn’t hear it nearly as well this time because the door to the next floor down was already swinging shut behind her when he bellowed.
On the other side of the door, she stopped because she didn’t know what else to do. The overhead wattage was bright, and she felt frighteningly vulnerable in its relentless glow. Heart pounding, she took a second to get her bearings. The floor was crawling with people. A young couple, visitors from the outside from the look of their cutoffs and flip-flops, were just walking into a room only a few doors away. A nurse stood at the nurses’ station writing something in a chart. Another one sat near the first, chatting on the phone. A man in scrubs conferred with a large group of what she presumedwere a patient’s relatives in the middle of the hall just beyond the nurses’ station. Beyond them, two little kids turned somersaults down the length of the hall.
Fortunately, none of them so much as glanced her way.
Quick, what to do?
Go back in the stairwell and head down, making like a bandit for the great outdoors? In a hospital gown, with an IV pole for a buddy? That wouldn’t be noticeable. Oh, no, not at all. Besides, any second now, Starkey and Bennett would start hunting in earnest for her. The thought sent a cold little thrill of fear racing down her spine. Would it occur to them that she might have taken the stairs? Unless they were idiots, she decided instantly,yes, it would.
Soon, the whole hospital would probably be put on alert. She didn’t know what the protocol was for dealing with patients who’d gone missing, but she was pretty sure something would happen. And here she was, wanderingthe corridors in a flimsy little cotton gown that left her way overexposed, tethered by the arm to an IV unit that was as tall as a flagpole. Somehow, she didn’t think she was going to be hard to locate.
The thought of being handed over to Starkey and Bennett—to say nothing of Ed—once they knew she had tried to run from them made her heart skip a beat.
She might not know much, but she knew what danger felt like when her body screamed it at her.
The nurse finished writing and slapped the chart closed. The sound made Katharine jump. Any second now, someone was going to glance her way… .
Move, a little voice in her head shrieked, and she did. IV pole and all, she shot across the hall, opened the door to the nearest room, and stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind her.
The light was off and the curtains were closed, though some light seeped in around them. Still, the room was dark and cool. Some kind of machinery whirred soothingly. The sound of heavy breathing brought her gaze to the nearest
bed. It was, she saw as her eyes adjusted, empty.
“Who is that?” a querulous voice demanded from beyondthe curtain that separated the room into halves. She had had a private room. This was a double, and clearly the empty bed had a roommate. “If you’re here for Dottie, they just took her down to X-ray.”
Katharine took a deep breath and found her voice.
“Uh, thanks,” she called back. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just use the restroom while I wait for her.”
“Help yourself.” The voice was definitely female, definitelyold, and definitely crotchety. “It’s not like I can use it. I just wish. You ever tried to take a dump in a bedpan?”
Hoping the question was strictly rhetorical, Katharine made a noncommittal sound by way of a reply and rushed into the bathroom. Closing and lockingthe door behind her, she flipped on the light.
And froze.
She was looking at her reflection in the big plate-glassmirror that covered most of the wall over the sink. At least, she knew it had to be her reflection, because— a swift glance behind her confirmed it—there was no one else in the small, gray-tiled, steel-fixtured room.
The thing was, though, the woman looking back at her—the stranger with the poleaxed expression and the IV unit teetering precariously beside her—was no one she recognized at all.
Whoever this woman was, it definitely wasn’t her.
6
You’re nuts.
That was her first thought. Her second, as she stared wide-eyed and openmouthed at what had to be her own reflection because there just wasn’t anyone else there in the bathroom whose reflection it could be, was Holy crap, I’ve woken up in somebody else’s body. Or something.
She had an unruly mop of curly auburn hair that cascadedaround her shoulders. Her skin was pale as milk. Her cheeks were full, her chin pointed. Her eyes were deep-set, with thick, dark brown brows that gave her expressiona distinguishing gravitas that she had always liked. And she was plumper, not plump but curvier, that was the word, than the waif in the mirror.