Angel Face

by Suzanne Forster

  “What the hell does that mean?” Jordan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “A visiting colleague could be dead, and you’re talking in movie spook lingo. What are you saying, Mr. Truitt, that you had something to do with what happened?”

  “Let me be clear about two things, Doctor. First, I gave you a code name. Use it. Second, we didn’t make the mess. We just cleaned it up. As I said, there was no choice. We cannot allow her to fall into the hands of the local police or any other law enforcement agency.”

  “Her?”

  “Angel Face, of course.”

  Suddenly Jordan was angry. He’d been about to tell the agent that he’d seen a woman who looked like Angel Face at the hospital, but that hardly seemed necessary now. “You can’t allow her to fall into the hands of the police, but you can sit around and allow her to kill doctors?”

  “If I thought it would make me look less inept, I’d say yes, I’m letting her do it. The truth is, she’s faster than we are. She even erased her own memory before we could get to her and do it for her. There’s enough secret information in that head of hers to take out a chunk of the globe’s population, but no one can get at it now, not even her.”

  “What kind of numbers are you talking about?”

  “That’s the worst-case scenario. The best is that no one dies a horrible death, but she brings down the current administration and some very key figures in the military-industrial-scientific complex. Neither scenario is acceptable.”

  Jordan wanted to know how she could be one step ahead of the CIA. “I couldn’t have been gone from that storeroom more than five minutes,” he said. “How did you know where to find the body? How did you get there so quickly? Did you have her under surveillance?”

  “We had you under surveillance, Doctor. I was tipped earlier today, probably by Angel Face herself, that she was going to strike again. I thought she was after you, not Dr. Inada. Obviously, that’s what she wanted me to think.”

  Jordan was being followed by the CIA? He hadn’t seen any sign of it . . . except the elderly woman with the walker. Cold air burned the back of his neck. He was sweating as he realized that a murder had actually taken place in this hospital.

  “She was here,” Jordan said, but not for the agent’s benefit, for his own. Maybe he needed to know he wasn’t protecting her in any way. “I saw her, probably moments after it happened.”

  “You saw Angel Face?”

  “I think so, yes. She disappeared before I could get to her.”

  The agent was silent, breathing softly on the line. “That’s interesting, Dr. Carpenter, but it’s not much help to Dr. Inada.”

  “What happened to him? Is he dead?”

  “Yes, but it’s been taken care of. You’ll hear about his car accident on the news tonight.”

  “My God,” Jordan whispered.

  “Are you ready to help us now, Dr. Carpenter?”

  “Dr. Carpenter!”

  Jordan was vaguely aware of the clamor in the hallway outside his office. Someone was shouting his name, but the voice that tugged at him was the agent’s.

  “I need an answer, Doctor.”

  A candy striper opened his office door and poked her head through. “Oh, there you are! They’re waiting for you in the OR. Your patient is prepped and ready to go.”

  “Dr. Carpenter?” The agent’s tone was low, insistent.

  Jordan’s gut wrenched with indecision. The man wanted an answer, and he didn’t have one. Worse, he was getting angry, and anger was heat. Surgery required icy logic, cold calculation, and total detachment.

  “I’ve got an operation to perform,” he told the agent. “This is life and death. I’ll get back to you.”

  “No, this is life and death. One of your colleagues is dead, and you could have prevented it if you’d cooperated with us.”

  “I’ll get back to you.” Jordan hung up the phone, ripped off his white coat, and flung it aside as he strode past the startled candy striper. He had little tolerance for no-win situations, and that’s where the agent had put him. They were asking him to be the bait and lure a serial killer into their trap. Put his life and his surgery schedule on hold for whatever period of time that took: days, weeks, months. Obviously, they hadn’t convinced him with the threat of his own death, so now they were trying to make him feel responsible for the death of a colleague.

  The hospital intercom system shouted his name. “Dr. Carpenter! Please report to the OR immediately.”

  Jordan broke into a run. She killed someone. The angel with eyes so big and brown they could rip your heart out. His downy innocent. His angel. She was a murdering, slaughtering killer.

  THE stamp-size digital recorder operated with such precision that no moving parts could be seen or heard. In fact, there were none, yet it could pick up conversations through walls, translate foreign languages, and had a battery life of days rather than hours. It could also detect whispers at twenty-five feet and analyze the voices of both callers for veracity.

  Firestarter smiled and unhooked his earpiece. According to the voice analysis of his last call, he was lying and the good doctor was telling the truth. Fortunately, he was the one with the surveillance equipment, and his only concern was with Carpenter’s honesty. If the doctor wavered, Firestarter would know it. There was no such thing as personal privacy anymore, not even the privacy of your own thoughts. Nothing could protect you against microchips so tiny they were invisible to the naked eye and surveillance devices that could pick up a heartbeat or a brain wave at significant distances. And then there was nanotechnology, the wave of the future, with nanobots the size of human blood cells that could float the entire circulatory system and scan any part of the body in detail, including the human brain.

  Surveillance was too big—or in this case, too small—to stop. And there was nothing that couldn’t be surveiled. Nothing.

  He opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out a jar of old-fashioned cold cream, wondering why they called it cold. It felt warm to the touch as he scooped out a silver dollar’s worth with his fingers and applied it in small figure eights to the ravaged side of his face. The taut skin felt as if it were on fire all over again. It was important to keep the area moist, his plastic surgeon had told him, and he didn’t like the prescription creams. They smelled bad.

  He rose, whisked a tissue out of the box on the credenza, and blotted the extra cream, aware of his own reflection, gleaming in the glass of a framed lithograph on his office wall. Most people thought him grotesque. He could see the discomfort in their body language even when it didn’t show on their face. He thought it was eerie and beautiful the way his face had healed. But then he thought everything about fire was eerie and beautiful.

  “What is it going to take, Doctor?” he asked the image in the glass. “What does it take to engage the great Jordan Carpenter?”

  This was turning out to be quite a contest, but then that was half the fun. The other half was winning. It was all a game, of course. And then there were games within games, spiraling down into ever more intricate circles until nothing was real. And the best player of all was Angel Face. If the death of a colleague didn’t do it, Firestarter was sure that she would come up with something even more interesting. In fact, he had unwavering faith that she would.

  THE driving pain in Jordan’s chest woke him up. He was facedown on the steering wheel, unable to breathe. His rib cage was about to crack with the pressure, and his first thought was that he was having a heart attack. What else could it be? The man who put hearts back together actually had one himself. It was exploding in his chest. God had him beat in the irony department.

  What the hell did he do now? He needed a doctor.

  Gently, he pressed his hands against the dash and pushed, wondering if it was the last thing he would ever do. The pressure eased as soon as he sat up, and the pain followed. He could breathe easily, again. The only symptom left was a sharp tenderness on his right side. That surprised him until he noticed the position
of the wheel spinner knob on his steering wheel.

  He wasn’t having a heart attack. He wasn’t dying. He’d passed out from exhaustion, slumped forward, and the knob had driven itself into his chest like a fist.

  The digital clock on his dash said it was three A.M. and he had a bypass scheduled for six. If he kept up this pace, he would have a heart attack or lose a patient through a stupid mistake. This couldn’t go on. He’d known that for months, but he understood it now. Facing his own mortality even for ten seconds had made him realize what he’d been doing. He’d made it his personal responsibility to save every damn patient on his waiting list, as if he were the only one who could. How absurd when there were other doctors—gifted surgeons—who could get the operations on their schedule more quickly than he could and probably perform them more safely.

  No wonder Teri Benson saw him as an obstacle. If anyone had a reason to want him out of the way, it was her. Steven Lloyd, the other valve specialist on his team, would also benefit if Jordan were to share the wealth. And so would a few other surgeons he could think of. There would be rejoicing in the halls of California General if he stepped aside, Jordan thought ironically.

  He let himself out of the car. Freshly mowed wet grass clung to the soles of his shoes as he crossed the lawn to the front porch. It smelled green and fertile, like new growth. Tomorrow he was going to start reassigning as many of his cases as made sense. He would focus on the high-risk valve repairs and replacements and the experimental procedures, instead of trying to do everything. The rest he would delegate. Good word, delegate.

  His house was ablaze with light as he approached the front porch. Jordan stopped, instantly wary. The other night it had been totally dark. Now this? He never left that many lights on. Something was wrong.

  He slipped up on the porch to look through the living room window—and froze at what he saw. The birdcage had fallen off its wrought-iron stand. It was lying on the floor, and Birdy had been caught underneath it.

  It looked as if the bird was dead.

  Jordan nearly broke down the door getting into the house.

  CHAPTER 7

  JORDAN carefully lifted the heavy wrought-iron birdcage and set it upright. It was four feet high and weighed thirty pounds, easy. More than heavy enough to crush the life from a five-ounce cockatiel.

  He dropped to his knees next to the limp form and told himself to stop shaking. He never shook in the OR. He was precise and machinelike. But it wasn’t personal then. It was plumbing, and he was a very skilled plumber. It had never been personal like this. And he’d never wanted to save anything as badly as he did this goddam bird.

  “I told Penny I didn’t want a house pet—” He got out that much before his voice cracked.

  He couldn’t feel a heartbeat in the cockatiel’s chest, and he couldn’t get enough control of his hands to compress the tiny area with any precision, but he had to try. Something inside him would crack wide open if he didn’t have this pest of a bird to ferry around on his shoulder.

  Sprawled on his belly, he dug his thumb into the puffed chest cavity and swore under his breath. Christ, how were you supposed to do CPR on a bird? The sudden anguish he felt made him want to laugh, but there was a blade ripping through him, one of his own scalpels, and the breathtaking pain of it gave him no choice. He had to do whatever he could.

  What the hell did vets do?

  And why hadn’t he ever watched that animal channel?

  He began the compressions, although faster than he would have on a human. Surely somewhere along the way he must have learned what a bird’s normal heart rate was.

  “Come on, dammit. Work with me—”

  He growled at the lifeless bird, pleading and threatening the way you would with a loved one. It was ridiculous and futile, but he did it because he couldn’t stand to hear the silence . . . or imagine the loss of her public service announcements on the state of his being—“Hey, stupid, wise up!”—some of them as sage as they were goofy. He did it long after he knew it was hopeless. She was gone, but he couldn’t let go.

  And then finally he stopped pressing, stopped talking, and just lay there, staring but not seeing, as unfocused and emptied of purpose as he could ever remember being. When he closed his eyes, he felt a void beyond his ability to describe. He felt the hole in his heart that had always been there, but that he’d never allowed himself to acknowledge. Maybe that was why he saved lives. Why he worked so hard. . . because of the innocent people he wasn’t able to save . . . because of the girl who loved him . . . and this silly bird.

  A wipeout. The awareness came to him some time later that this was a wipeout, the worst of his life, the kind you didn’t walk away from.

  “Bad bird! Get in your cage!”

  Jordan lay there, wondering if he was hearing things. It sounded exactly like the cockatiel, but it couldn’t be. She was still on the floor next to him.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

  This time he felt a convulsive tremor. He might never have made it off the floor if the sensation hadn’t rocked him to his feet. He’d either heard a bird or he’d gone completely crazy. Jordan turned in circles, looking for the source of the noise. It took him awhile to figure out where she was, but finally he spotted her on the top shelf of the bookcase, teetering on the trim and peeping at him as if she couldn’t imagine why he was acting so strangely.

  “Birdy?”

  “Fooled you,” she croaked. “Fooled you, fooled you.”

  Now he understood what it meant to see a ghost. He stared at the bird for ten solid seconds with absolutely no idea what to do. There was a dead bird on his carpet and another one who looked exactly like Birdy, clinging to the bookcase trim. Someone had to have put her up there. She couldn’t fly. But regardless, it just didn’t compute. It was surreal.

  It hit Jordan that he had to do something, and his reaction was automatic. He went over to the cockatiel and held out his finger as he’d done so many times before. She eagerly hopped on, then scuttled up his arm to his shoulder and began having her way with his hair, blissfully nuzzling and pecking.

  Relief nearly buckled Jordan’s knees. This was Birdy. She wasn’t dead, and maybe he wasn’t going to rupture like an artery under pressure. There was still the question of where the bird on the floor had come from, however.

  Jordan felt a whoosh of cold air behind him. Laughter rang in his ears and a woman’s voice whispered, “Fooled you, fooled you!”

  He’d left the front door open, and it closed with a bang before he could get himself turned around. He had to move slowly with the bird on his shoulder, but if anyone had been there, they were gone. There was no one in the living room but him and Birdy.

  Jordan had begun to think he was dealing with another ghost when he saw the note on the floor. It was lying next to the dead bird and scrawled in black marker pen on butcher block paper were the words, “You’re next!”

  JO R D O N made two urgent calls in the middle of the night. The first was to the Cardiac Surgery Unit, telling them there’d been an emergency. His six A.M. bypass would have to be rescheduled, and there would be a change in the surgical team. With the patient’s consent, Jordan intended to have Teri Benson perform certain key aspects of the surgery, with Steven Lloyd supervising.

  Teri routinely opened and closed on Jordan’s surgeries, and he’d passed the scalpel during procedures as well, including having her do the vein grafting for bypass operations. She’d shown extraordinary precision and control, and Lloyd was a brilliant surgeon and teacher. The patient would be fine in their hands, Jordan knew. But it was still one of the toughest calls he’d ever made. He was at war with his own overarching sense of personal responsibility and maybe his own ego. He’d never been a big believer in fate, but in situations like this, it helped to think that things happened for a reason. Maybe circumstances were forcing him to let go, and maybe that was for the best.

  His second call was easy. It was to the CIA agent.

  Jordan glance
d at his long-lost pocket pager as he tapped out the agent’s phone number. The pager was sitting on the couch next to him, and the last message that showed in its display was from Angel Face, telling him that she wished he had taken her seriously. She wished? He’d found the pager tucked under one of the living room rugs, along with his electricity bill and a remote that had been missing for weeks.

  “I’m ready,” Jordan said as soon as Firestarter came on the line. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  Jordan wasn’t expecting the audible sigh of relief he heard.

  “What changed your mind?” the agent asked.

  Jordan was sitting on the couch, tilted over his knees, staring at the red, white, and blue hook rug beneath his bare feet. The entire house was still decorated in the early American furniture he’d grown up with. Even the smell of his mother’s lemon oil lingered, although Penny might have had a hand in that. She’d threatened to hire him a housekeeper, but that wasn’t Jordan’s style, so she sneaked over and cleaned up every once in a while.

  Birdy was on the coffee table, making confetti out of a saucer of sunflower seeds.

  “Angel Face,” Jordan said. “She’s fucking with me. I want to fuck back.”

  “What do you mean? She made an attempt on you? I need to know what happened, Doctor.”

  But Jordan was in no mood to share. “Someone broke into my house. I think it was her. Just tell me what the plan is.”

  “If you knew what the plan was, you would do things differently, and I want you to go about your normal life. You’ll be paged and told what to do when the time comes. Meanwhile, you’re on call. You understand that concept.”

  “For how long?”

  “Indefinitely.”

  Whatever vulnerability Jordan had sensed in the agent was gone, and apparently he was tossing out orders to make up for it. “I can’t be on call indefinitely. I’m a surgeon. You don’t open a chest and then excuse yourself to go catch a serial killer. There are lives—”