The Red Room

by Ridley Pearson

  Knox catches the attention of a twenty-something waitress with wide eyes. It’s clear she’s been awaiting his signal. She delivers a black tea with sugar substitute and milk on the side.

  Grace doesn’t know whether to thank him or be annoyed with herself for being so predictable—an attribute to which she attaches negative connotations.

  “So,” he says, studying the nurse’s uniform in a John Knox way that makes her incredibly self-conscious. “I can pretty much guess the first part of whatever’s going on.” He contemplates the hospital across the street. “But I seem to be missing something.”

  She mixes the tea like a lab scientist. Sips. Adds a speck more sweetener. Examines her lipstick residue on the cup’s white china.

  “The mother,” Grace says. She, too, looks across the street.

  “Oh, shit. How stupid can we get?”

  “It was late.”

  “We’re idiots.” Knox attempts to process the FedEx shipment, to suss out how it connects to Akram Okle’s sick mother, who occupies a bed across the street. “What the hell?”

  “I know, right?” Grace hears herself sound American. She attributes it to the two years in grad school in Southern California. Wonders if Knox notices. These expressions bubble up occasionally, catching her by surprise. She thinks of herself as entirely Chinese; not a view shared by her father, who considers her a traitor to tradition.

  A young boy skateboards past. Grace instinctively squeezes her purse between her thighs.

  “Why would they care about the mother?” Knox’s face is not meant for confusion. He looks boyish and lacking in confidence.

  “One wonders.”

  “Come on. What the hell do you hope to accomplish dressed like that?”

  Knox is threatened by her fieldwork. She takes this as a compliment, but knows she still has much to learn. She wonders if a person can learn to ignore the ordered, logical, straight-line thinking that defines her. Envies the ability of his mind to spark and jump as it does.

  “Before you go in there, we need to work this backward,” Knox says, his voice soft now. Sexy. “First, we have to consider whether or not the client is simply ensuring that whatever medical device the mother needs is on schedule. Perhaps he is literally tracking it, making sure no one messes with it en route. In that case, Mashe’s in league with our client and our client is simply looking out for his mother. Right?”

  It’s like listening to chamber music, a melody going to an unexpected place.

  “Or, the opposite, of course,” he says. “This agent interrupts the delivery of a medical device. Steals it in order to determine the true extent of her illness. Knowledge is power. Perhaps they want leverage over Mashe? Then there’s substituting one device for another. It’s more difficult and tricky, but possible.” He ruminates. She isn’t about to interrupt. Two years ago it might have been different, but they’ve both learned the footsteps of this dance. “Oh . . . God.” Her system charges with adrenaline as she meets his intense gaze. He’s looking through her. Into her. “Long shot,” he announces, warning her. “The medical device is part of a dead drop. The device being shipped contains a data chip intended for Mashe. No Internet, no chance of interception. All you need is an insider at the device manufacturer who solders an extra memory chip into the device, and you’ve shipped information across borders. Which begs the question: who is Mashe Okle, or Mashe Melemet, or whatever name he’s traveling under this week? An Iranian arms dealer? Your financial investigation says no. An art dealer? A rich businessman? Maybe an agent, an Iranian agent? And what are the Iranians up to these days that they might be seeking classified information?”

  Grace has the urge to reach across the cigarette-scarred table and take his rough face in her hands and plant a kiss on his lips. But Knox would take that as her handing him her hotel keycard. All she can do is let a ripple of excitement surge through her, sit back and sip the tea.

  “You’re the computer tech,” he says. “Find him.”

  “You think I have not tried? Mashe Okle’s past has been expunged.”

  Knox says sarcastically, “Try harder. His university records. Scour the West for immigration records, trips abroad.”

  Why is he able to conceive of a strategy she’s missed? She has asked Dulwich for Okle’s immigration records, but looking at that request through Knox’s suspicious eyes, she wonders if Dulwich has been honest with her, if there really is no significant travel out of country as Dulwich earlier reported.

  “There are more than two hundred universities in Iran,” Grace says. “Do you know how long it would take to hack each of the admission servers? Years. Do you think you can throw a switch and hack a national immigration database? You think the terrorists wouldn’t love to control such information? It is impossible, John. Firewalls as thick as the Great Wall.”

  “He’s an agent,” Knox says.

  “No. He is an unknown.”

  “The device is a package. The mother, an unknowing courier.”

  “The first step,” Grace says, “is for me to get in there and see her chart. To determine the extent of her illness. The office is working on this, too, but I can speed it up. Determine what device might have been shipped. Slip a piggyback onto the hospital’s network as I did in Amsterdam.”

  Knox drags his hand down his face in frustration. “We’re off-mission,” he says. “Way off.”

  She imagines Dulwich’s appreciation for her delivery of the information—her insight into Mashe’s true role and her discovery of the agent working behind the scenes. She doesn’t want to seem too eager, conceals her excitement from Knox. “You are right. We should perhaps go back to our respective rooms. Await contact from Akram. Proceed as intended.”

  “Says the woman in the nurse’s uniform.”

  Grace hangs her head demurely. Caught. These acts of contrition seem to be in her DNA, passed down a hundred generations. There is no place for such reactions in her professional life; she wishes she could rid herself of them. She strains to lift her head, but her neck muscles resist. Rigor mortis.

  “We need Sarge to come clean.”

  “David has been consistent, John. He has emphasized Need To Know protocol and demanded we protect the wishes of the client. You are correct, we are off-mission.” Knox reacts best to reverse psychology.

  “Drastically.”

  “We should return to our lodgings. Regroup.”

  “Of course we should,” Knox says.

  “If you go in the hospital, you are impossible to miss,” Grace says. “Whereas I am far more invisible.”

  “You sell yourself short.”

  She wonders if she was fishing for the compliment. Worries she was.

  “How do you expect to find her room? It’s a big hospital.”

  “Taken care of,” she says. Answers his inquisitive look. “I was forced to pull her account financials to get the lead on Mashe. Her room number is four-three-one.”

  “Four-thirty-one,” he says correcting her. “You can be so Chinese.”

  “Just imagine.”

  “I’ll flag a taxi,” Knox says. “I’ll find an alternative exit—something other than the front lobby—and text you my location. You will call me now, leave the line open. I want to hear everything you’re up to.”

  “Agreed,” she says. It’s standard operating procedure, at least for the two of them.

  “Nothing absurd,” he cautions. “You may meet some of these people later.”

  “Understood.”

  “An in-and-out.” A look overcomes him.

  “What?”

  “That’s what Sarge called it. Made it sound so—”

  “Simple.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is his job,” Grace reminds him.

  —

  GRACE SLIPS into the nurse’s role as effortlessly as she do
nned the uniform. She crosses the hospital lobby head bent, shoulders slumped and the head scarf worn down her forehead as a brim to screen her face. She rides the elevator aware of the likelihood of security cameras.

  She walks out onto the fourth floor wanting to impart a sense of familiarity with the floor plan when in fact it’s foreign to her. Many of the men in the waiting area wear the ubiquitous black leather jacket and she wonders if any of Mashe Okle’s bodyguards are among them. She angles her head away.

  She marvels at how small the op’s boundaries have become. They are shrink-wrapped by a need for secrecy, by the clandestine nature of the work. Everyone wants the same thing while no one knows exactly what they want.

  Three hallways extend like spokes off the hub of a semicircular nurse’s desk that roils with activity. It’s like an airline check-in counter twenty minutes before the flight. Doctors, nurses and orderlies swarm together with a clear delineation of power visible in who concedes to whom for countertop space.

  Spotting an incorrect room number, she pivots in a course change and bumps into a doctor. Recovering, she moves toward the Melemet mother’s room. She didn’t need the tea; she’s riding an unhappy marriage of caffeine and adrenaline. Visitors crowd the rooms into which she peers. Some emit laughter. Some stifle sniffles or tears. Grace processes it in her gut rather than her head, suddenly weighed down by loss and shattered hopes. She harbors a fear of illness. Is worried that someday one of these beds will hold her mother or father; recognizes that her mother would welcome her company, but would her father allow her in? Worries she has waited too long to repair the damage between her and her father—heritage, generational tradition, familial honor. She allowed the love of a boy—a mere boy!—to separate them. Her father has not reached out to her since; but neither has she.

  She must focus. The trick—the skill in such situations—is invisibility, to move among others in such an obnoxiously mundane manner as to not exist. The scarf and glasses create a decent enough disguise. What she must prevent is anyone addressing her or paying her any attention. She will, with any luck, meet Akram Okle in the near future.

  Grace counts on a degree of racial prejudice as well as the white dress to help her blend in. Having already determined that the patient charts are stored at the foot of the bed, not in wall racks in the hallways, she knows she must infiltrate. She clears her throat; if required to speak, she will affect a moderately high, annoying voice with a Chinese accent, much like her mother’s. She can adopt the identity without thought, so accustomed was she to mocking her mother when with her brother.

  Barely checking her stride, she enters room 431. Seeing only the far bed occupied, she walks steadily toward the chart that waits for her like a raised finger.

  Beyond the partially pulled curtain sits a man; he’s facing away from her and toward the older woman in the bed. Occupying a stool on the window side is a man in his sixties with a thick white mustache and thin white hair.

  Grace’s throat is dry as she slips the clipboard from the clear plastic pocket.

  She has already asked Xin and the Hong Kong office to work backward from the woman’s hospital charges to determine her likely illness. It’s ongoing. Grace’s mission here is to look for scheduled surgery prep or the mention of a medical device that could be one of the many BioLectrics products. She scans the first page. Nothing. She senses all eyes on her as she flips to the second. Scans this. Nothing. The third.

  “Everything is good?” In Turkish.

  Grace is confident in her execution of a limited vocabulary. “Yes,” comes easily. “Routine,” follows, also spoken well. She keeps her eyes low out of deference and respect, lowers her head, takes four steps and encounters a leather jacket.

  “Excuse me,” she says, head still down.

  “You are?” English, with a thickly Arabic accent.

  “In a hurry, if you do not mind?”

  The younger man behind the curtain, Akram or Mashe, she assumes, laughs.

  “Easy!” this man says, instructing the one in front of Grace. “Let them do their work.”

  “This one is new to us,” the bodyguard says.

  The sitting man is standing now. He rakes back the privacy curtain angrily. “You have interviewed the entire hospital staff, I suppose?” Persian. Iranian. His irritation with his guards intrigues her; she compartmentalizes it for later analysis. This one, she is sure, is Mashe. “Let them do their jobs! The sooner my mother is well, the better for all of us. Do you hear me?”

  The jacket steps aside. Grace has yet to look higher than the guard’s belt.

  “I am sorry, nurse,” Mashe says.

  Grace nods and passes into the corridor. She hears rapid footsteps approaching from behind.

  An orderly runs past.

  Grace bites back a smile. She eyes the chaotic nurse’s station, checks down the hall and spots one of Mashe’s guards. He is watching her, compounding his earlier distrust.

  The guard sidles toward the nurse’s station. He’s calm and introspective, exceptionally smooth and practiced at appearing that way. In a few short steps he tells her more about Mashe Okle’s importance than she knew even following all her research.

  Grace must not overreact. She and this man are testing one another. The crush of bodies is claustrophobic, preventing her from a quick escape. She eyes the elevators. The stairs are her second option. Men like him are deceptively fast in spite of their size. She’d rather not test him.

  Grace doesn’t want a close quarters confrontation. She’s capable of self-defense, is as well trained as he. But the man has eighty pounds on her and a longer reach. It will be possible to postpone the damage, but only that. Instead, her best bet is to get out front and then keep it a race, all the while not allowing him to realize what’s going on. It’s time for smoke and mirrors.

  The best way to accomplish this reality break is to instill doubt, to reaffirm her cover. Rather than separate herself from the nurse’s station, she turns and briefly joins three nurses studying paperwork. The guard can’t force his way into the nurse’s station. Instead, he comes around the front, eyes boring into Grace’s back.

  Grace manages to block the background noise like noise-canceling headphones. She hears the guard ask someone if he could please speak “with her.” She feels the heat run up her spine. He explains he’s unfamiliar “with her” and that he wishes to discuss why she was just examining the chart in 431.

  As this mostly one-way conversation carries on behind her, Grace quietly introduces herself to the two nurses as an employee of the Ministry of Health, an introduction that runs shivers up their spines. Her Turkish is passable, but since the ministry might easily employ doctors and scientists from around the globe, Grace is not overly concerned. She allows them to hear that she’s checking standards and practices and that the annoying man at the counter behind them is about to unintentionally expose her, which will defeat her purpose here and might reflect poorly on the hospital.

  She leaves it at that. No direct request, no suggestion as to how they conduct themselves.

  When the woman at the counter tries to gain Grace’s attention, the older of the two nurses turns and chides her. They are not to be disturbed. If a patient’s guest needs something, they should apply to the attending nurse.

  Grace keeps her attention on the paperwork.

  A minute later, she overhears the receptionist asking the man to move on, pointing out the posted signs requesting that guests occupy either the waiting area or a patient’s room, but leave the corridors clear. Grace wishes she’d had the time and foresight to print bogus business cards—so useful at a time like this. The bodyguard has chosen the small waiting area, more of an alcove with airport seats, enabling him to keep an eye on the elevators and stairs.

  Grace studies the metal engraved fire diagram mounted in the nurse’s station. There’s an exit at the end of each of the
three corridors. Physical therapy takes place in the east corridor; she spots several patients walking slowly, holding on to the rolling stands carrying their IVs. It’s the busier of the two corridors available to her.

  She leaves the station without so much as a glance toward the waiting area. She has at least a thirty-foot lead. She must pull this off without arousing suspicion, without compromising the op.

  It’s a magic trick she has planned. She notes the location of a mobile laundry bin well down the corridor. She can use the knot of the slow-moving patients and their nurses to her advantage. Assumes but does not confirm that the guard is following her.

  She can imagine that from his vantage point, he will briefly lose sight of her among the addled parade of staggering patients when she enters a patient’s room. He will slow, maintaining a position that provides him with a line of sight to the doorway. But his view will be obscured for at least several long seconds.

  He will try to see around the patients walking the corridor blocking his view.

  When and if he dares to enter the hospital room, he will find its privacy curtains pulled back, exposing occupied beds. There will be no attendant in sight. No nurse. Nothing to suggest the woman he was following. She has vaporized.

  He may try several more rooms. Eventually he will return to the nurse’s station.

  “The woman? Brown head scarf? Short?”

  The nurse stares at him as if he’s daft. “No idea.”

  “The woman you were talking to.”

  “Who are you?” she asks. “Why do you ask this?” The nurse knows that the Ministry of Health can make a world of problems if it so chooses.

  He will not think to look into the laundry bin parked in the hallway, would have to dig to see a white nurse’s uniform and brown head scarf buried two layers down. Has only a vague recollection of a woman slipping into the stairway. Was she wearing yoga pants and an Under Armour top? He gives it no weight whatsoever, his full attention on finding the missing nurse who paid an unexpected visit to 431, who glimpsed the man there he’s sworn to protect.