by Graham, Ian
He moved on through the ward towards the end of the hallway, where the rear entrance to the hospital was marked by a set of automatic glass doors. Directly in front of the entrance stood a nurses' station teaming with men and women in scrubs.
"Are you looking for someone, sir?" asked a loud female voice.
Castellano looked at a blonde haired woman with a no bull expression who sat behind the desk in pink scrubs . "I'm looking for a man who was brought in here from the Cottonwood Road area with lacerations to the head and hands."
"You're going to have to be a lot more specific than that. We've admitted over fifty people in the last hour and lacerations are the flavor of the day."
Her lack of bedside manner didn't surprise him. He'd been in and out of hospitals for the last twenty years during the course of his work, first as a police investigator in New Orleans and then as a field agent in the FBI before obtaining his current position. Doctors and nurses had some of the highest burn out ratios in the country and what normal people considered an emergency barely caused them to break a sweat.
Removing his badge from inside his coat and flipping it open for what seemed like the hundredth time that night, he said, "This man had a laceration above his right eye and on the back of his right hand. He was slim with blonde hair and a beard. He might've been speaking with an accent. I'll need you to check your intake forms and give me a list of the possibilities. It's very important that I speak with him."
The lady flipped through a stack of papers, but before she could answer a harried male voice from behind Castellano spoke. ""I'm afraid you're going to have to come back later, officer. We have an emergency situation here."
Castellano turned around and looked at a gray haired man in a white lab coat who moved from the edge of a gurney to the countertop at the nurses' station.
"I'm Doctor Garvinton. I'm the lead physician on the floor," the man continued. "Right now, I've got three patients to a room and another twenty in the hallway. Your interviews are going to have to wait until later."
Garvinton grabbed a stack of medical charts and began thumbing through them.
"My interviews can't wait until later, Doctor," Castellano said, his voice dripping with contempt. "In case you haven't noticed, we've all got an emergency situation. The man I'm looking for may very well be a witness to the murder of the man we believe was the target of the university bombing. If he's here, I need to speak with him right away and hopefully we can keep whoever did this from striking again."
"If he's a witness to the murder of the target then the target is already dead. No need to strike again if they were successful the first time."
Garvinton moved around Castellano and began to walk away.
"Look," Castellano said, grabbing the doctor by the shoulder and holding up his badge again. "I'm Assistant Special Agent in Charge Seth Castellano of the FBI's Richmond Counterterrorism Division and this is a matter of national security."
Garvinton looked over the edge of his wire-rimmed glasses for a moment before speaking. "The description you just gave sounds like a man we took to room six about ten minutes ago. One of my physician's assistants is with him now stitching his injuries closed, but you're going to have a lot of trouble talking to him since he's been coming in and out of consciousness. He suffered a pretty hard hit and has a concussion. I won't know the extent of his injuries until I get an x-ray tech in here to photograph him, but I can tell you he'll be held for observation at least until morning and that depends on what the x-rays show. The best I can do for you tonight is to point you towards our waiting room, where his wife is."
Castellano followed the doctor's finger with his eyes as he pointed to an open doorway to the right of the ward's entrance.
Garvinton continued. "I've just finished speaking with her. Her name is Constance McIver and the man you're asking about is Declan McIver. He's the only person here fitting the description you gave and the few words he's been able to say were accented...Irish, if I had to guess."
"Thank you, Doctor."
Garvinton nodded and quickly walked away.
Castellano took a deep breath realizing that there could be more than one witness. Why hadn't the first responders on the scene mentioned a woman? Had she been on the scene or had she arrived at the hospital upon news of her husband's injury? He walked toward the open doorway and leaned in to take a look. A slender woman with auburn colored hair sat alone on a green vinyl bench in the eight-by-ten room, a tissue in her hand.
"Mrs. McIver?" he asked gently.
She straightened herself up and sniffed away a few tears as he entered. "Yes?" she said looking up with a question on her face.
"I'm ASAC Seth Castellano with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
He stepped fully into the room and opened his badge. She looked at it briefly and then back at him, meeting his stare with sea green eyes.
"I'm leading the investigation into the death of Abaddon Kafni—" before he could finish speaking he could tell by the look on her face that she hadn't known Kafni was dead.
"I'm sorry," he said interrupting himself. "You didn't know?"
She shook her head as she dabbed at the edges of her eyes with the shredded tissue. He waited a few moments for her to collect herself and then continued. "It was my understanding that your husband, Declan, is it?"
Constance nodded.
"It was my understanding that he was at the scene. Is that correct?"
She nodded again and said, "Yes."
"And were you with him?"
She shook her head. "Only as far as the front gate. We left the university together and when we got to the residence we found the guard at the gate dead. He sent me to call for help because we couldn't get a signal on our cell phones."
Castellano nodded. Just as they had planned, a signal jammer had been used to black out cell service for several hundred yards around the property to prevent anyone from calling for help. What they hadn't planned for was someone arriving at the property after Kafni and being able to leave to summon help. "So you weren't there when he was injured?"
She shook her head and dabbed her eyes again with the tissue.
"Why did the two of you leave the university and go to the Briton-Adams property?"
"My husband was a friend of Dr. Kafni's. He worked security for him for a while. Declan helped get Dr. Kafni out of the building when—when it happened."
There it was. The connection he'd been afraid of. An injured gardener or some kind of other domestic help that just happened to be on the property wouldn't be so bad. Maybe they'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but a trained bodyguard? It was all but certain in his mind that Declan McIver had been directly involved in the scene at the mansion. But if that was the case then why had Ruslan Baktayev and his men left him alive? What did he know? Could he identify the men who'd killed Kafni? Castellano drew in another breath as the questions and potential answers ran through his mind.
He'd been afraid that just such a mistake would happen and had tried to make sure Kafni was dead long before he ever reached the property. While Baktayev wouldn't have been happy about being unable to kill Kafni personally, as he had planned, he couldn't argue with the fact that he had been killed by a bomb originally intended only to evacuate the premises. Castellano wasn't in the business of making terrorists happy. He was in the business of making sure both he and David Kemiss were successful. Unknown to Baktayev, with the help of four hired guns, they had increased the size of the bomb in hopes of killing Kafni and had even placed the four men at the scene to ensure everything went as planned. Now, thanks to the apparent intervention of a former bodyguard nobody had known about, Baktayev's plan had gone forward and everything he and Kemiss had feared was now a fact of life.
"You said he used to work security for Kafni, but he doesn't currently?"
"No," Constance answered. "He worked for Dr. Kafni in the late nineties and for a short while after September 11th. It was before we met so I really do
n't know much about it. Tonight was the first time I'd met Dr. Kafni. We were supposed to meet him for dinner after the event had concluded. It's been several years since he and Declan have seen each other."
Castellano nodded. "I see."
"Agent Castellano, what happened?" Constance asked, becoming visibly upset.
He didn't know what was going through her mind exactly, but after two decades of experience interviewing witnesses to various types of crime, he had a pretty good idea. Confusion mixed with moments of clarity was common.
"Well," he said, "I don't know yet. That's what I'm trying to put together. We're only in the very early stages of our investigation."
"Declan said there was a bomb in one of the security vehicles," she said, as she sucked in a loud breath and did her best to wipe away the tears falling from her eyes.
"It was in one of the security vehicles?" Castellano asked, trying to sound surprised.
"Yes. He said he saw the vehicle burning as we ran towards our car. He said it was one of the cars that belonged to the security guards."
Castellano grimaced as each word from Constance McIver confirmed to him that her husband was indeed a threat. But how should he handle it? He crossed his arms and felt the grip of his service weapon underneath his coat. With so many witnesses around, it would be impossible for him to act.
"Mrs. McIver," a female voice said from the doorway.
Castellano turned to see a young woman in a white doctor's coat standing just inside the door.
"Yes?" Constance answered, as she stood from the bench she'd been sitting on.
"I'm Lisa Baker. I'm a physician's assistant. I've just finished with your husband and we're moving him up to an observation room in the hospital. You can see him now."
"Can I talk to him?" Castellano asked abruptly.
"No, sir," the P.A. said. "You'll have to wait."
"It's important that I speak with him if he's conscious—"
"I'm sorry, sir. It's Doctor Garvinton's orders. Mr. McIver isn't to be interviewed until his condition has been properly diagnosed."
Constance started to walk out of the room. Castellano stopped her.
"I really need to speak with your husband as soon as possible. This is my card; my cell phone is on it. I'd like you to call me as soon as he's able to speak with me."
Constance nodded. "I will."
Castellano watched as she slipped the card into the pocket of her coat and walked out of the room. Following her briefly, he stopped at the edge of the doorway and looked after her as she walked to the side of a gurney that was being wheeled into the hallway from one of the rooms. As an orderly pushed the cart towards the nursing station Castellano caught his first glimpse of the man he'd been looking for. Declan McIver was just as the EMT had described him and unlike the doctors had said, he seemed perfectly alert as he gripped his wife's hand and looked about the room.
Stepping through the automatic door that led to a covered entrance at the rear of the hospital, Castellano removed his cell phone from the pocket of his coat. The light rain that had been falling most of the evening had turned to a heavy downpour, the rain drumming against the roofs of the cars parked in the lot beside the outpatient center. He pressed his ear closer into the phone as he listened to it ringing.
"It's me," he said as David Kemiss answered. "We've definitely got a problem."
Chapter Twelve
10:02 a.m. Eastern Time – Saturday
Virginia Baptist Hospital
Lynchburg, Virginia
"Mr. McIver," a doctor said, looking over charts on a clipboard as he walked into the hospital room, "I would say that you're one of the luckiest people I've seen come through here in a long time, but last night would prove me wrong. Thankfully, there were a lot of lucky people in here."
Declan sat up slowly in the hospital bed. After narrowly escaping death at the hands of a group of Islamic assassins, he'd been resting in an observation room since being moved from the makeshift Emergency Room downstairs.
Inside, the Virginia Baptist Hospital looked like any other hospital; white walls, white floors, white drop ceiling, machines buzzing and popping, and overworked nurses and doctors rushing about. Inside his room was dark, lit only in brief flickers and flashes from the television screen that hung angled from the ceiling opposite his bed. A few pieces of particle board furniture occupied the private room and a bathroom barely big enough to turn around in sat off to the side. Not being accustomed to just sitting around, the feeling of going stir crazy was worse than either the pain in his hand or the pain in his head. He closed his eyes and reopened them, gradually allowing his eyesight to adjust as the doctor turned on the lights.
"I guess it's true what they say about the luck of the Irish," the doctor continued, with an arid smile. "You are Irish, right?"
"Aye," Declan said. In fact, he actually thought of himself as an American, having been in the United States for fifteen years, but he was constantly reminded of his heritage whenever he opened his mouth.
"I'd really rather that you not be watching television," the doctor continued. "It's important that you rest for the next several days. It's not uncommon for people who suffer head trauma to have spurts of vomiting and in some rare cases loss of consciousness. You really are quite lucky. If you'd suffered even a shade more trauma than you did, we'd be talking about an entirely different injury. But as it is, the stitches in your hand should be out in a week and you should be back to normal within a week or two at the most. None of the x-rays we've taken in the last twelve hours indicate any continued swelling. Save for that bit of broken skin above your eye, there's no sign you were even hit. I'm going to recommend the doctor on shift this afternoon release you. We should have you out of here in time for dinner, but I still want you to take it easy. Beware of operating any vehicles or equipment."
Declan nodded his agreement, trying to keep his elation at finally being released to a minimum.
"You have a visitor," the doctor said tucking the clipboard under his arm. "I'll show him in."
"Be brief," Declan overheard the doctor saying to someone in the hallway. "He's already spoken to two of your men this morning against my recommendations. As quickly as his injuries seem to have healed, he needs rest, not to be constantly reminded of everything he's witnessed."
Closing the door behind him, a tall, brown haired man in a perfectly pressed three piece suit entered; he was carrying a thick manila folder. His hair was heavy with product and brushed to one side; a soapy fragrance followed him as he strode to the single chair in the room and took a seat, pulling one leg up to rest across his knee.
"Mr. McIver, I'm ASAC Seth Castellano," he said opening the folder. "I'm glad we're finally getting a chance to talk."
An air of youthful superiority emanated from the agent and bells rang out in Declan's subconscious. Unsure of whether it was his bureaucrat BS detector or something else, Declan nodded but remained silent.
"I understand from the staff here that you spoke with the local police earlier, is that correct?"
Declan nodded. "Aye, that's right."
"Let's get one thing straight right off the bat, Mr. McIver; the local police have no jurisdiction over this investigation, none, zero. This is a federal matter and as such it falls to me. It's my case, and you don't talk to anyone about it but me. Clear?"
"Hardly a time for politics and inter-department quarrels, is it?"
"The local police aren't inter-department. They're not inter-anything. Sheriff Andy and Deputy Fife will screw this case up six ways to Sunday and have their men out looking for turban-wearing camel jockeys at the local mosque."
"They were Chechens and Turks. Maybe an Armenian or two, but they weren't Middle Eastern."
"Chechens, Turks and Armenians, that's your story?"
Declan nodded slowly, taken back by the agent's wording. What exactly did Castellano mean by the term “story”? Was he implying that he didn't believe what Declan had told the police?
"I talked to the locals myself," the agent began, with an air of incredulity. "You're saying you witnessed a terrorist cut off Mr. Kafni's head and then hold it up in triumph, is that correct?" Castellano closed his fist and waved it through the air as if he was holding a severed head by its hair.
"That's not what I told them. I heard the leader of the group say he was going to do that." Declan stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. "I heard him say he was going to decapitate Kafni and mail his head to his family. Then I saw the group leave and one of them, the leader, was carrying a white sack with blood pooling in the bottom. Are you watching his family? You can't let anyone deliver anything to them!"
"Well, then, you see my point about the locals," Castellano said, ignoring the plea. "They'd have everyone believing in and searching for the Legend of Sleepy Hollow complete with a flaming pumpkin and a broadsword."
Declan gripped the railing of his bed tightly, his knuckles whitening. Castellano was baiting him for some reason and he didn't appreciate it.
"So who were these men? You told the locals they were Muslims. Then you told me they were Chechens, Turks and Armenians. How do you know the one carrying the sack was the leader? How many were there? What did they look like? What were their names? How did they get there? What were they driving?"
Declan knew that Castellano was trying to confuse him into making a mistake with the rapid fire questioning, but it wasn't going to work. Despite being injured, he was sure of what he'd seen and of the descriptions of the men involved. "I don't know who they were and I don't know their names. It's your job to find that out and catch them. They were driving two dark red GM Suburban model SUVs and there were thirteen of them. I shot two of them and eleven escaped. In the dark it looked like most of them had dark hair and light complexions, but I only got close to the two that tried to kill me. I know the man carrying the sack was the leader because the others were protecting him as they escaped. He had little or no hair and looked like he could have been sick because his skin was pallid and he was thin for his height. Chechens, Turks and a small percentage of Armenians are Muslims, look it up."