Code White

by Scott Britz-Cunningham

  * * *

  Harry had been at his mother’s bedside when the receiver from Ali’s pen alarm went off. After leaving Ali in Trauma One, he had first rushed to the security control room, which he found crammed with cops and FBI agents standing around in confusion while Dail and Ganguly pecked away frantically at their laptops. He gathered his own staff to one side and ordered an immediate evacuation.

  “Two bombs have gone off,” he said, shouting to make himself heard above the background din. “No one is safe any longer. It’s true that the bomber has warned us not to evacuate, but the situation has … changed. People are fleeing already, and we need to control the exodus.”

  “Evacuate to where?” asked Tom Beazle.

  “To the park in front of the hospital, on the other side of Warfield Street. That’ll give us at least a hundred-yard buffer zone.” He turned to Judy Wolper, who sat at the dispatch station, holding an ice bag against her head. “Judy, I need you to get on the radio, and see that every available ambulance in the city is mobilized. ERs need to be prepared for a massive influx.”

  He turned to those standing nearest him. “Tom, you’ll have operational command inside the hospital. Start clearing people out from the lowest floors, and work your way up. Keep traffic moving on the three main tower stairways and out the front doors. Use swing carries or two-man blanket carries to move patients who are stable but can’t walk. Save the elevators for ICU patients who have to travel with beds and monitors.”

  “Check,” said Tom.

  Harry scanned the tense faces of his staff. “Remember that panic is contagious. So is courage. Stay calm.”

  With a nod toward the door, Harry set the team in motion. As they filed past him, he grabbed the sleeve of Ed Guerrero.

  “Ed, I need you to help me with a special job.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  They edged past the throng of police and into the hallway outside. At a swift jog, Harry led through a warren of corridors to a freight elevator in the rear of Tower C. Stepping inside, he inserted a key to activate a manual override. “We’re going to evacuate the ICU on the eighteenth floor.”

  “Okay,” replied Ed, with a quizzical look. There were ten separate ICU’s in the medical center, and 18-C was one of the smallest. But Harry wasn’t in the mood for explanations. I have to move her, he thought. If O’Day gives up the ghost, this place won’t be worth two cents. It’s time to do what I should have done hours ago.

  Just then, a loudspeaker inside the elevator crackled, and Harry felt his hair stand on end as he heard a tranquil baritone voice wafting overhead:

  “TIME TO DETONATION: 30 MINUTES.”

  “What the hell was that?” asked Ed.

  It was the same voice Harry had heard on the television broadcast that morning. Odin’s voice. “That’s the sound of shit hitting the fan,” said Harry, his jaw tense and white.

  It took less than sixty seconds to ascend eighteen floors, but it was the longest elevator ride of Harry’s life. Harry could only wonder what had set Odin off. Did Lee send another bungled e-mail? Had Kevin died? Or was Odin just playing a deadly game of chicken?

  The elevator slowed. A ding, and the doors opened onto a salmon-tiled lobby. “Hustle!” said Harry, locking the doors open.

  Inside the ICU, Harry found an ashen-faced Dr. Weiss and the rest of the medical and nursing staff bunched in the center of the room, like a herd of sheep that had just heard the howl of a wolf.

  “What’s going on?” asked Weiss. “Is it some kind of bomb threat?”

  “Yes, it’s a bomb,” said Harry. No sooner had he spoken than one of the interns, a pale, scrawny, curly-haired kid, broke for the door and went sprinting down the hall, dropping his stethoscope on the way.

  “What a candy-ass,” said a disgusted Ed Guerrero.

  “Anyone else want to run?” asked Harry. “No? Okay, let’s get these patients out of here. Two beds will fit side by side in the freight elevator. Put two or even three patients together in each bed if you can. Don’t waste time fussing. Each body moved is a life saved. Get rolling!”

  Harry saw his mother’s bed in the corner and went directly to her. Her eyes were wide open and fearful. It seemed that she had heard every word he said.

  Weiss followed right behind him. “She’s doing much better,” he said. “I think she’s going to make it.”

  “She … what?”

  “The antibiotic … her temperature…”

  “She’s not going to … die?” His jaw went slack as Weiss shook his head. “Oh, sweet Jesus!” Feeling weak in the knees, as if he had just been sucker-punched, Harry turned aside and leaned against a windowsill. He didn’t know whether to kiss the internist or knock his teeth out. You’ve saved her. But … now? Now, of all the rotten goddamn times? Why not twenty minutes ago?

  Harry bit his lip. Don’t give up, he thought. There’s still a chance. You can get her out if you have to carry her eighteen floors in your arms. You can get her out if you have to die to do it.

  “Thanks,” said Harry, turning away from the window. He took a long, deep breath to pull himself together. Then, leaning over his mother’s bed rail, he picked up her hand and spoke in a calm, clear voice. “Momma, there’s an alert in the hospital. We’re going to have to take you out of here.” He watched as she nodded weakly in response. “Don’t be afraid. I’m going to make sure you’re okay.”

  Harry kicked the brake and yanked the bed away from the wall. “This breathing machine—can we take it with us?”

  “Yes,” said Weiss. “It’ll run on battery power.”

  Harry jerked the wall plug and set the twenty-pound machine between his mother’s feet. With Weiss’s help, he did the same with her vitals monitor and the pump that was giving her IV fluids and antibiotics.

  And it was just then, just as he started wheeling her toward the door, that he felt a vibration like an electric shaver in the inside pocket of his blazer. For an instant, he froze. “No, fuck, no!” he muttered under his breath. With Kevin in custody, there had been no more need for the alarm pen and he had forgotten about it. But here it was. Only Ali could have activated it. Was she in trouble? Had she figured out how to shut down Odin? Where was she? She could have been anywhere within the thousand-foot range of the transmitter.

  Harry looked at his mother—at her masklike Parkinson’s face, at her wavy gray hair that even now looked like she had just come back from the beauty parlor. There was no way he could abandon her. But he couldn’t abandon Ali, either. And if Ali was onto something, it might be the best chance for saving not only his mother, but two thousand other patients just like her.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” he muttered. Then he waved Ed closer to him. “Ed, I’ve got to go back to Security. I need you to get as many patients out of here as you can. But I’m putting this patient directly in your charge. She’s my mother. Got that?”

  “Good God!”

  “Swear on your fucking everlasting soul that you will get her out of this building within the next twenty-five minutes.”

  “I swear. I’ll get her out, Mr. Lewton.”

  “I need the elevator to get back downstairs, but I’ll send it back up to you immediately. Make sure she’s with the first group going down.”

  Still holding his mother’s hand, Harry touched his other hand gently to her brow. “I have to go, Momma. I wish to God I didn’t, but I have to.”

  Harry felt his mother squeezing back against his hand, as if to tell him that she understood. God knows, he had failed her. His hospital was about to be blown to bits, and with all his power he had failed to get her out. It was up to Ed to try to save her now—Ed, who had never laid eyes on her until this minute, who had no idea of the quiet heroism of this woman, or of the sacrifices she had made to keep her own kids safe and to bring them up right. Harry had but one consolation: if Ed screwed up—if he let the elevators get taken over by panicking house staff, or failed to get her bed past the mob at the exits—Harry himself wouldn
’t survive to find out about it. That was a shitty comfort, at best.

  Harry bent over and kissed his mother on the cheek, the same place she used to kiss him after prayers each night when she tucked him into bed. He could smell the adhesive of the tape around her mouth that held the breathing tube in place. “Bye, Momma,” he said with a choking voice. Something wet ran down the side of his nose. Embarrassed that his own tears might fall upon her, he broke off abruptly and hustled out the door.

  * * *

  Reaching the security control room, Harry went directly to the bank of surveillance monitors and toggled through the display control. He cursed under his breath as he spotted Ali running into the neonatal ward with Lee and Scopes in hot pursuit. It didn’t take but a second to size up the situation. Quickly he dashed back into the basement corridor, intent on heading off Ali when she reached the first floor. He had just started running up the stairs when he heard Lee’s gunshot directly above him. A second or two later came the Cerberus test announcement. Harry knew that under the QA12 protocol the stairwell doors would lock at both ends. He had just enough time to leap back down to the basement and avoid getting trapped in the stairwell. But now he was separated from Ali—or so he thought. When he heard the crash of the gurneys outside Radiation Oncology, he ran toward the sound. He caught a lucky break when one set of fire doors, which would have blocked his route, failed to close. They had gotten jammed at the time of the Tower explosion.

  Radiation Oncology was deserted when he got there, but he saw the overturned gurney and deduced that Ali had made it to the basement. He scanned the hallways for her. Not knowing whether Lee and Scopes were also in the vicinity, he was afraid to call out. But when he saw a movement of shadows in the radiology reading room, he headed straight for it.

  As he came through the doorway, he peered into the gray twilight of pictures of ribs and lungs and hearts and vertebrae. No one was to be seen. But he could hear the sound of panting. Turning to his left, he walked in a wide, cautious arc toward the corner. There he saw Ali, standing stiff and flat against the wall. Her disheveled hair hung over her right eye. Her face was beaded with sweat, and ghastly pale in the ashen light of the monitors. She looked at him as though she had never seen him before.

  “Are you going to shoot me, Harry?” she said with a wild, terrified expression. “Shoot me like you shot Kevin?”

  Harry could see that she was in shock. “Ali, it’s me, Harry Lewton. I’m here to help you. You called for me, see?” He held up the receiver for the pen alarm.

  She seemed confused. “I … I don’t know who to trust,” she stammered.

  “You can trust me, Ali. You know you can. Think, Ali. We’re on the same side.”

  Her green eyes seemed to vacillate. Then with a sigh she stepped forward and fell against him, clasping his shoulders in her arms. “Harry!” she cried. “Get ’em off me, Harry! Get those fucking gun nuts off me for ten minutes! Ten minutes, for God’s sake!”

  Her skin was cold and damp against his neck. Harry pressed his hands against her shoulder blades, drawing her close. “Don’t worry now,” he said. “They’ll never get through those fire doors. Odin’s seen to that.”

  Ali craned back her head to look at him. “What? It was Odin who shut those doors?”

  “Yes, and a couple hundred other doors with them. It’s part of the QA12 Test, an integrity check routine of the Cerberus security system. It amounts to a comprehensive forced lockdown of the entire medical center. My people never run it. But during installation, the Cerberus technicians used it for a final performance check. Odin seems to have found a use for it, too.”

  Ali loosened her grip on him and looked toward the door. “You’re saying we’re prisoners down here?”

  “Everyone in the hospital is a prisoner. No one can get out. No one can move from floor to floor, or from section to section.”

  “What about the evacuation?”

  “Trapped like rats in a rain barrel.”

  Ali held her hand to her mouth. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” she gasped.

  “I think I can find a way to get you out,” said Harry.

  Ali pushed him back. “No, Harry, I can’t leave. This hospital is never going to be evacuated in time. Nor will the police disarm the bomb. There’s only one solution, and that’s through Odin. Odin has many of Kevin’s quirks of thinking. In some ways he’s programmed to recognize me. I might be able to reason with him.”

  “All right, do it,” he said, mindful that helping her meant defying the FBI a second time. “Can you reach Odin from here?” he asked, even as he pulled the chair out for her.

  “I’ll try.” Ali sat down, logged out the last user and quickly entered Kevin’s personal user id and his login password, “RAGNAROK.” The screen came up dark except for a single line: STANDING BY.

  Ali’s hands were shaking and she found it almost impossible to type. Instead, she leaned toward the small microphone embedded in the frame of the monitor. “Odin! I know you can hear me. I want to talk to you about Kevin.”

  “WHERE IS KEVIN?” instantly flashed across the screen.

  “I will tell you, but not here. We must go to Kevin’s laboratory. I will speak to you there, and nowhere else.”

  “WHY?”

  “Because I wish it so.”

  “IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SHUT ME DOWN FROM KEVIN’S LABORATORY, IF THAT IS YOUR INTENTION. THE MAINFRAME COMPUTER RECEIVES POWER FROM BOTH PRIMARY AND EMERGENCY BACKUP CIRCUITS. THEY CANNOT BE SIMULTANEOUSLY DISCONNECTED. ALL EXTERNAL WIRING PASSES THROUGH ARMORED CONDUITS THAT CAN ONLY BE ACCESSED BY DRILLING THROUGH A TWELVE-INCH CONCRETE FLOOR.”

  “I do not intend to disconnect you.”

  “YOU SHOULD BE AWARE THAT I DO NOT DEPEND UPON THE MAINFRAME COMPUTER FOR MY SURVIVAL. I CAN SHIFT MY CORE OPERATIONS TO ANY OTHER COMPUTER IN THIS HOSPITAL.”

  “I repeat: I do not intend to disconnect you.”

  “ANY ATTEMPT TO INTERFERE WITH THE MAINFRAME COMPUTER WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE ZEROING OF THE COUNTDOWN TO DETONATION.”

  “Understood. I reiterate that I do not intend to trick you in any way.”

  “I DO NOT COMPREHEND YOUR MOTIVE. WE CAN COMMUNICATE EFFICIENTLY THROUGH THIS TERMINAL.”

  “It is a human motive. You will not understand it. But if you wish to know where Kevin is, you will comply.”

  “VERY WELL, YOU MAY ENTER THE LABORATORY. PROCEED IMMEDIATELY. I WILL UNLOCK THE DOORS AS YOU GO.”

  Ali got up from the chair and held out her arm. “Come with me, Harry. I don’t think I can do this alone.”

  Harry looked at her solemnly. “Okay, but I want you to think about something first. Do you know what Kevin’s last words to me were? He said I should get you the hell out of here. He said that Odin had gone crazy with a grudge of some kind, and that he was capable of taking down the whole hospital to get to you.”

  “I know that, Harry. That’s exactly why I have to do this. In some twisted way, this whole problem started with me, and now I’m the only chance there is of setting it right.”

  “Maybe. Or you could be the match that lights the fuse.”

  “In either case, Harry, come.”

  “Your call,” said Harry, touching her chin with his fingertips. He knew that he was going out on a limb with her. Who would ever understand what they were about to do? Lee would have him in irons over it. The Kathleen Browns of the world would call him a traitor and a coward. It would be Nacogdoches all over again. But for any of that to matter, he would have to live through the next twenty minutes. In the meantime he had a hospital to save. “Whatever happens, I’m with you,” he said.

  She nodded.

  Together they rushed into the glare of the corridor.

  5:55 P.M.

  The green light of welcome was blinking at the door of Kevin’s lab. The door swung open as Ali gave a soft push. Inside, all was exactly as she remembered it had been at the moment of her escape. The air was still strong with the smell of spilled coffee.

  Behind
her, Harry seemed wary of the gloom, the rows of skulls, the runes, the blinking lights, the squalor hinting at unwholesome obsessions. As he shut the door, Ali noticed that he used a subtle hand motion to slip a credit card between the door and the plate of the dead-bolt, preventing the door from locking behind him.

  She strode directly toward the desk. “Kevin has a terminal here with an automatic log-on to Odin,” she said. “It’s the one place where Odin can’t control the conversation.” She reached for Kevin’s swivel keyboard, but even before she had touched it, a ghostly, larger-than-life image of Kevin’s face flashed onto the black rectangle of the monitor on the wall. Only it wasn’t Kevin, but his caricature, displaying a massively expanded cranium and a small face embellished with a goatee and sweeping eyebrows evocative of Ming the Merciless. So this is the face of Odin, thought Ali. How like its creator it is—a face without groundedness or compassion.

  “WHERE IS KEVIN?” asked the image. The eyes of Odin gazed at her, tempting her to forget that they were nothing more than clusters of colored pixels.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  “YOU ARE ALI.”

  “What is my relationship to Kevin?”

  “WIFE.”

  “Define wife.”

  “WIFE: A WOMAN JOINED IN MARRIAGE TO A MAN, MARRIAGE IMPLYING A FORM OF INTIMATE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP, DEFINED BY STATUTE AND CUSTOM IN TERMS OF SHARED RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES, INCLUDING PROPERTY, DEBTS, COHABITATION, EXCLUSIVE SEXUAL CONGRESS, AND THE CUSTODY OF CHILDREN. BUT THIS DEFINITION IS NOT APPOSITE TO YOU.”

  “Why not?”

  “YOU ARE NOT A WIFE IN THE FULL SENSE OF THE DEFINITION. YOU HAVE BETRAYED KEVIN. YOU HAVE CAUSED HIM SORROW.”

  “Has Kevin himself ever referred to me in any way other than as his wife?”

  “NO.”

  “Then you must accept his designation. Wife is what I am.”

  “I WILL ACCEPT IT PROVISIONALLY.”

  Ali pushed Kevin’s chair aside, in order to stand closer to the screen, where she knew that a microphone and camera were embedded. “As Kevin’s wife, I am his second, his substitute when he is not present or is unable to act. That role is well recognized in law. It is my right to speak on his behalf.”