The Patient

by Michael Palmer

  Broad-shouldered linebacker Dave Scolari was up in a chair by his bed, wrapped in a blanket, his head immobilized inside his steel cervical halo. He was still unable to bear enough weight to walk, but the therapists had fitted him for braces and were glowing about his future prospects. Quadriplegic less than two weeks ago, he now had excellent movement and strength in his arms, and improving coordination in his hands. As Jessie anticipated, Armand took his post by the door. She took her stethoscope from her lab coat, placed it around her neck, and positioned herself so that she could converse with Scolari without being easily overheard.

  “What in the hell is going on here, Doc?” Scolari asked. “Who took my phone? I’ve been ringing the call button like crazy. Nobody answers. Who in the hell is he?”

  “That’s Armand. Armand, this is Dave.”

  The killer looked over at them disdainfully and locked his hand on the stock of his weapon.

  “Armand and some others have taken over Surgical Seven and sealed us off from the rest of the hospital,” Jessie went on. “They plan to be here for a couple of days.”

  “Did they hurt you?” Dave asked.

  “No. They’ve killed five people so far and are threatening everyone else, but I’m immune. They want me to operate on their leader.”

  “Enough!” Armand barked in heavily accented English. “Finish what you have to do and move on.”

  Jessie set her stethoscope in her ears, but kept the earpieces pressed just outside her auditory canal opening.

  “I need a diversion, Dave,” she whispered as she pretended to examine him, her back to Armand. “Something loud that will bring all these people running in here.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “It’s got to be convincing.”

  “I understand.”

  “In ten minutes. Do it at exactly five past.”

  “Got it,” Dave said, looking up at the wall clock.

  Armand was moving toward them when she pocketed her stethoscope and stepped back.

  “You’re coming along fine, Dave,” she said. “That little wheeze in your chest is nothing to worry about.”

  The clock ticking, she led Armand back to the room next to Tamika Bing’s. With a minute to go, she reentered Tamika’s room and again fixed her stethoscope in place. At precisely five after the hour, there was a loud crash from Scolari’s room, followed by eerie, animal-like, bellowing cries of pain. Another crash. Armand turned and raced toward the sound. A moment later, Arlette hurried past the door without looking in.

  Jessie quickly tucked the note she had written under Tamika’s thigh, then picked up the phone cord and ran it under the tray table before inserting the connector into the back of the laptop. Finally, she pulled the sheet over the cord, covering as much of it as possible. She had just set a towel on the tray table to shield the rest of the cord when Armand reappeared at the door.

  “Come quick,” he commanded.

  Jessie kissed Tamika on the cheek.

  “Remember to dial nine first for an outside line,” she whispered.

  I knew that! the girl typed.

  Dave Scolari was thrashing about in what was probably his attempt at feigning a seizure. He had somehow managed to knock over his sturdy bedside table and his tray table. Saliva was bubbling from his mouth, mixing with blood from where he had actually bitten through his lip. Jessie was relieved to see that the cervical halo was intact.

  “He’s having a seizure,” she said. “I need medicine to stop it. Tell the nurses to bring me a syringe with ten of Valium in it.”

  Arlette hesitated, then nodded to Armand that he could carry out the order. A minute later, he handed Jessie a loaded syringe. She jammed the needle just beneath Dave’s thigh, and injected his robe with tranquilizer. Then she bent over and put her lips by his ear.

  “You did good, Dave,” she whispered. “You did real good.”

  CHAPTER 31

  CORRIGAN’S TAVERN WAS A DARK, MUSTY CORNER saloon not far from the Bowker and Hammersmith Funeral Parlor. Alex sat on a stool at one end of the bar, working on a tumbler of scotch—the second of what he planned to be a series of twenty or so. The evening crowd was drifting in, and the level of smoke in the place was actually starting to get to him.

  Well, so be it, he thought. The deal he had made with himself about no cigarettes until Malloche was dead or in prison never mentioned secondhand smoke. And if the shit gave him lung cancer, so what. He had blown everything that mattered to him, and blown it all big-time. Along the way, he had called in enough markers from the agency, the FBI, and certain politicians to finish forever any chance of ever getting more help in catching Malloche. Then there were all the ways he had lied to Jessie, and the risks he had convinced her to take in helping him with Hermann’s body. And for what? Now, he had no place to go and no one who cared. After this fiasco, it was likely that even the people at the academy would want nothing to do with him.

  There was also the slight matter of the body he had stolen from the hospital—another gem. He had called and left a message for Richard Jones at the funeral parlor to contact Orlis Hermann on Surgical Seven. That was the best he could do at the moment.

  What difference does it make anyhow?

  Alex sipped at his scotch and tried to remember the last time he had been certifiably, gut-tearing, bury-me-before-you-wake-me drunk. It wasn’t anything he was especially looking forward to, but then again, what was? Okay, he acknowledged, Jessie Copeland would have been something to look forward to. Every single day. He cared about her—more than for any woman he could remember. He cringed at the thought of calling her with the details of the monumental failure of his life. She had just begun to trust him. Now, she’d never believe anything he ever had to say.

  What did he have to show for his forty-three years on earth? A one-room flat in Paris that he could barely afford, a future at the agency that he could probably measure in weeks, and a résumé that was one prolonged blank spot. His bank accounts were woefully thin, and his connections to friends and family had long ago been sacrificed on the altar of destroying Claude Malloche. What more could a good-looking, brilliant woman like Jessie Copeland possibly want in a man?

  He drained the last of the scotch and was about to order a third when he caught a fragment of conversation from a man standing behind him. Actually, what he overheard were three words: Eastern Mass Medical. He spun around on his stool.

  “What about Eastern Mass Medical?” he asked a group of four.

  “Where the fuck have you been all afternoon?” a lumberjack-sized construction worker, his speech beginning to thicken, roared at him.

  The others laughed. Alex blew past them, grabbed the larger man by his shirt, and hoisted him up onto his tiptoes. This is what he really needed at this moment, he was thinking. A huge wise-ass to bring down to size, not a self-destructive bender. The bender could come after.

  “I asked you a question,” he said.

  The giant stumbled back, brushing Alex’s hand aside in the same motion. The talk throughout the tavern abruptly ceased with anticipation. For several seconds, no one around them moved or spoke. There was the scraping of chairs as others in the place stood to watch. Then the man, perhaps sensing from Alex’s expression and stance that he was some sort of psycho, put his hands up, palms out.

  “Hey, pal, easy does it,” he said. “Cool your jets. This is a friendly place. If you don’t like the way we do things here, go somewhere else.”

  “I asked you about the hospital.”

  “Okay, okay. They had some kinda outbreak there. A virus, I guess. I don’t know for sure. A bunch of people are dead, though. I do know that much.”

  “The hospital’s closed down,” someone else chimed in.

  “It was four,” another offered. “Four people are dead.”

  With the crisis in the bar over as quickly as it had begun, the patrons now seemed to be talking all at once about the developments at EMMC. Alex pushed a twenty toward the bartender, found a relativ
ely quiet corner, and called the hospital. He got a recorded message saying that all hospital lines were tied up, that the hospital was temporarily closed to new patients, and that all emergencies should be taken to Eastern Mass Medical’s associate institution, White Memorial, or to one of the other Boston hospitals.

  A previous page to Jessie had gone unanswered. Now, he tried her again. The recorded electronic hospital page operator answered, and promised his message had been sent.

  Four people dead. The hospital sealed up. Alex dialed his answering service.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Bishop,” the FBI operator said. “We were about to try to reach you. A call just came in for you a few minutes ago. Someone named Ricky Barnett.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “It was very strange. He sounded like a little boy, and he was very shy. He said that he had a message for you from a friend of his.”

  “A friend? Who?”

  “He didn’t say except that she was in the hospital.”

  Call Alex Bishop at 4269444. Message from Jessie. Tolliver is Malloche. Lisa dead. Five of them have wired Surgical 7 to explode. Soman gas hidden all over Boston. Will be released if there is any trouble for Malloche. Four killed in lab as a demonstration. Be careful.

  Alex sped toward EMMC with Ricky Barnett’s e-mail message propped against the steering wheel.

  Tolliver is Malloche.

  Bishop felt a dreadful spasm in his gut at the news. Not only had he completely missed his target, but because of his incompetence, agent Lisa Brandon was dead, and Jessie—and it appeared many others—was in serious danger. The irony was almost more than he could bear. Claude Malloche was right there on Surgical Seven, all right. But he was most certainly not there for the taking.

  Thirteen-year-old Ricky Barnett told him that he had formed a secret computer club with Tamika Bing and two other kids. The e-mail message from Tamika, which Alex had the boy spell out for him letter by letter as he transcribed it onto a blank bar tab, had been sent from the hospital earlier in the afternoon, but wasn’t retrieved until Ricky came home. Alex had him send a message back to Tamika, telling Jessie he understood and would do what he could. Now, he was trying to learn about soman. He was about a mile from the hospital when his cell phone rang.

  “Agent Bishop?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Abdul Fareed, here. I’m a toxicologist at Georgetown. I do some contract work for the agency. They said you wanted information on soman.”

  “I do.”

  “If you’re dealing with soman, you’ve got trouble. It’s also called GD. It’s an inhaled neurotoxin—the most powerful stuff of its kind. Works three or four times as fast as sarin, the gas those fanatics used in the Tokyo subway. Respiratory and central nervous system collapse all at once. One hundred percent fatal from a single decent breath.”

  “Any antidote?”

  “The only antidote I know of, carbamate physostigmine, is almost as toxic as the gas, and has to be taken before exposure. I’ve got a call in to a friend of mine in Jerusalem who is one of the world’s experts on neurotoxic gases. If she has anything to add to what I’ve said, I’ll call you.”

  “Okay. If I don’t answer, call my service and insist on speaking to someone from the agency or the FBI. Tell them all you know.”

  “One other piece of information I can pass on is that the half-life of soman is pretty short. If you’re at ground zero, and there’s decent ventilation, and you can hold your breath for two or three minutes, you’ve got a chance.”

  “Thanks, that’s very reassuring.”

  Alex hung up and dialed a number in Virginia.

  “Seven-eight-two-eight,” a woman answered. “May I help you?”

  “This is Alex Bishop calling back.”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “Were you able to get any of the information I wanted?”

  “Yes, sir. Eastman Tolliver is the executive director of the MacIntosh Foundation in Valencia, California. They fund research projects, mostly in the medical field. Mr. Tolliver has been on a trip to China for over two weeks. He’s not expected back for another ten days. That’s all we have right now. Is there anything else we can do?”

  “No, no thank you.”

  Police had cordoned off the area a block away from the hospital. Filling the streets outside the blockade were mobile broadcasting vans and enough police cruisers to suggest that the rest of the city might be ripe for the picking. From what he could tell, no one seemed anxious to get any closer to EMMC than they were. With no CIA ID, it took fifteen minutes and two phone calls before Alex was waved past the wooden barriers.

  He pulled onto a side street just across from the main hospital entrance and waited. Ten minutes later, an unmarked, windowless van pulled up behind him. He waited until the lights had been cut, then scanned the area for anyone who might be watching them. Finally, he gathered up his security guard uniform from the back seat, left the rental, and approached the van on the driver’s side. The two FBI agents inside introduced themselves as Stan Moyer and Vicki Holcroft. Moyer was a slightly built, balding man in his forties, whose heavy-lidded eyes and wire-rims made him look more like a classics professor than a Fed. Vicki was young, though not as young as Lisa Brandon. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her features, while undeniably pretty, were also sharp and businesslike.

  “Back door’s open,” Stan said. He waited until Alex was inside, then asked, “Is it true that Lisa’s dead?”

  “I believe so.”

  “She was a terrific kid.”

  “I know.”

  The van was equipped with three TV monitors, several telephones, and banks of instruments on both sides. Alex freed up a chair from its tie-down straps and scanned the consoles. Then he brought the two agents up to date on what he knew. Vicki worked her way into the back and took a seat beside him.

  “I’m glad we were around,” she said. “Stan and I helped design this van. There are others who can handle most of this equipment, but not like us.”

  “The problem spot is the seventh floor of the Surgical Tower, right over there.”

  Vicki peered at the tower through the front windshield and shook her head.

  “Too high to pick up anything through our parabolics. We’ve got fiber-optic cameras, though, and some pretty awesome little microphones. If we can slip them up through the floor, or down through the ceiling, we should be able to see and hear a heck of a lot. Stanley’s a master at doing it if you can get him up there.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. They’ve got about forty hostages up there right now, and a million hostages out here. That gas could be hidden anywhere.”

  “And what’s your connection on the floor?”

  “Believe it or not, it’s a thirteen-year-old kid named Tamika Bing, with a laptop. She’s a patient on Surgical Seven. Somehow she’s been able to get an e-mail message out to a friend of hers named Ricky Barnett. He called me.”

  Vicki brightened.

  “How much into computers are they, do you know?” she asked.

  “I can find out by calling the kid in Roxbury. He and Tamika formed some kind of computer club. I know that much.”

  “That sounds promising. We’ll call and ask him if Tamika has an ICQ number.”

  “ICQ?”

  “It’s an instant messaging system. If she’s got one, I can download the ICQ software from our office in just a few minutes so that we can hold a give-and-take conversation with her from right here.”

  “Here’s the boy’s number,” Alex said. “He’s waiting to hear from us. I need to change back into my security guard uniform so I can get into the hospital. Vicki, if you haven’t had a cardiogram lately, you may want to look the other way.”

  The woman smiled, picked up the phone, and turned her back to him.

  “What are you going to do once you’re in there?” Stan asked.

  “I’m not sure. First, maybe, I’ll try to speak with someone in maintenance, or else th
e hospital CEO, to see if I can get blueprints of the place.”

  “The CEO is otherwise occupied,” Stan said. “He’s supposed to be holding a press conference right now. No, wait, it’s not as late as I thought. It should start in a minute or two.”

  He clambered into the back, electronically raised a satellite dish that had been concealed in the van’s roof, and switched on one of the monitors. All the local channels were getting pictures from the same single feed—an unadorned podium in the main foyer of the hospital, fitted with several microphones. For a time, there was only a technician, readying some cables. Then, a drawn and clearly troubled Richard Marcus approached the podium. Behind him stood a scientist in a lab coat, and a man from security.

  “I am Dr. Richard Marcus. For more than six years I have been the CEO of the Eastern Massachusetts Medical Center. My specialties are internal medicine and, ironically, infectious disease. I am here to give you all a briefing on the situation in our microbiology lab and on Surgical Seven, our neurosurgery floor. To this moment, there have been five deaths, four in the lab and one on Surgical Seven. We strongly believe the deaths are due to a very rapidly acting microorganism—most likely some sort of virus, which causes a brain infection called encephalitis, characterized by massive brain swelling and in most cases, rapid death. There is evidence of several more cases still evolving on Surgical Seven, so we have shut the floor down, and effectively sealed off the hospital as well. We currently have a team of microbiologists at work. That is all the information I can share with you at this time. However, we will bring you updates every hour on the hour, and immediately if there are any major developments. Hopefully, next hour there will be some telephone hookups here at this podium so reporters can phone in questions. Meanwhile, I beg your patience as we try our best to contain this outbreak. Thank you.”

  Marcus left the podium without calling on the scientist to speak.

  “Impressive man,” Stan said. “Maybe there is no gas. Maybe it is a virus.”

  “Highly doubtful,” Alex replied.

  “Why?” Vicki asked.

  “Well, for one thing, that security guard standing behind Marcus was one of Malloche’s men.”