Butterfly on the Storm

by Walter Lucius

  It was almost all behind her, she assured herself.

  18

  Marouan surveyed the situation. He knew where the special squad in their medical getups had stationed themselves: one was acting as a desk clerk and the other was supposedly keeping a close eye on the patient monitors. The only clearly identifiable security was the uniformed policeman at the door. It was his task to be noticed. He was probably dripping with sweat with that bullet-proof vest under his uniform.

  All of them were wearing an earpiece. There had been rather frequent communication in the first few hours. But this had tapered off. No suspicious movement. No conspicuous visitors, except for the disheartened blonde critical-care physician who appeared at the ICU escorted by Calvino. Marouan noticed she’d been crying. Apparently, she wanted to see the boy. Marouan thought he’d give them a moment to get this emotional bullshit over with.

  In the meantime, a failed suicide was brought in. Within minutes Calvino returned to the lift with the blonde doctor. A nerdy type was pushing a linen cart along the corridor. The patient in Room 3 went into septic shock. All this misery and woe got on Marouan’s nerves.

  In the last hour, Marouan had started to doubt Kovalev’s prediction. He’d been given a description of the probable hitman, but it was as vague as the average weather forecast. Young, noticeable scar on his left cheek, dressed all in black. Existentialist type. All well and good, but the guy wasn’t going to walk into the ICU smoking a pipe and quoting Sartre.

  Shortly thereafter, Calvino checked in via his earpiece. He’d returned to Hospital Security and been told the MICU, the mobile intensive care unit, would arrive in about ten minutes. The plan was for Marouan to head to the inner courtyard where he’d meet the arriving MICU team to finalize the transfer, while Calvino would hand over the monitoring task to a colleague.

  Marouan had a bad feeling. ‘Can’t we wait with the transfer until we have this guy in custody?’

  ‘I understand what you’re saying, partner,’ Calvino said. ‘But our instructions are clear. You and I are responsible for the boy. We’ll accompany the MICU to Rotterdam. The rest of the team hauls in the Russian the minute he shows his face.’

  Marouan would have done anything to get away from the ICU as quickly as possible. Together with Mariska, he sped to the ground floor in the staff lift. He felt his ears pop and that sick feeling in his stomach returned. It was like when you dropped something breakable and knew you’d be too late to catch it. He pinched his nose and popped his ears open. Had he overlooked something? He had no idea. Hospital Security, a police guard and armed undercover agents were all on standby.

  Everything under control, you’d think.

  Maybe it was the messy cramped courtyard that worked on his nerves.

  ‘The ambulance entrance of the underground car park is too low for the MICU,’ Mariska said, sensing his anxiety. ‘That’s why we always receive it here.’

  Marouan nodded. Then he heard an alarm. At first he thought it was the siren of an approaching ambulance. But Mariska looked up, equally startled.

  ‘What is it?’ Marouan asked.

  ‘There must be a fire on one of the wards,’ Mariska replied.

  At that moment, Marouan knew he’d let something slip out of his hands, and it was probably already too late to catch it.

  Fire.

  Why hadn’t this ploy crossed his mind?

  ‘You meet the MICU!’ shouted Marouan at Mariska as he ran back into the building.

  19

  The practical shoes with the steel toecaps she wore underneath her ambulance uniform always made Vera Hendrix feel like a construction worker. But they were a bitter necessity, those shoes. The stretcher they used on these special transports, the so-called MICU trolley, was fitted with lots of equipment and weighed a couple of hundred kilos. You wouldn’t want the wheels to accidentally land on your toes.

  The MICU itself was a twelve-ton container, built on a Volvo lorry undercarriage and set up as an intensive care unit on wheels providing inter-clinical transport of ICU patients. Together with driver Harold Jacobs and IC specialist Ewald Jong, Vera made up the team accompanying this evening’s transport.

  It was rare for the timetable to be revised last minute and the team to be personally briefed about the next transport. Both had happened today. The original transports had been postponed with immediate effect. The MICU coordinator on duty told them the patient in question was a boy of around seven, the victim of a hit-and-run. It had required two surgical interventions to stop the internal bleeding, reset a broken pelvis and a leg fracture, remove part of his spleen, attend to a head trauma, lung injuries and internal bruising and stabilize the boy so he could be transferred to the children’s ICU at the Maaspoort Hospital in Rotterdam. Secrecy was of the essence.

  After the briefing they hurried back to the MICU. Normally they always checked their equipment prior to departure, but given the urgency of the transport they decided to do so en route to the WMC. Vera checked the trolley with the attached IC equipment to see if it had sufficient battery life. Properly charged batteries were crucial, because in between loading and unloading a patient, the respirator, monitor, controls and infusion pumps had to keep working. Vera remembered that one time they got stuck in a hospital lift for almost ninety minutes because the trolley turned out to be too heavy. The batteries started draining like mad, but when they were freed after what had felt like an eternity the patient was still stable because the batteries had been charged in full on departure.

  A check revealed that the batteries were at seventy per cent capacity. She glanced at Ewald. ‘Acceptable risk,’ he said. She disagreed, but given the situation there was no use arguing. The respirator’s automatic control system indicated that everything else was fine.

  Because of the thick partitioning wall between the driver’s cab and the IC unit, she and Ewald could only communicate with Harold via the intercom. But a monitor connected to a camera inside the cab gave them a view of the road. Vera tended to get carsick if she couldn’t look at the road every now and then.

  Harold informed them that their planned arrival time at the WMC would be in ten minutes, and that after loading the boy they’d receive a police escort. When they drove on to the WMC site soon after, they were overtaken by two fire engines with blaring sirens.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Ewald yelled through the intercom. They could hear Harold urgently conferring with the WMC over the radio.

  ‘Fire in the ICU!’

  20

  Sasha Kovalev got out of his car just before the large plaza in front of the WMC. Menacing grey clouds loomed overhead.

  No matter where he went, he felt like a stranger. He’d spent his entire life on the move, so no place felt like home. It suited him just fine. He felt privileged to have experienced how a lavish nomadic existence transcended borders and time zones. How often had he gazed out the window of Lavrov’s private jet at the world below and fought the seductive notion that he was a demigod who could triumph over time and space: master of his own destiny. An illusion, of course. People were made to fail. You had to do your best to stay one step ahead of that failure.

  Especially now.

  Before leaving his flat half an hour earlier, he’d given the skyline of Amsterdam one last look, knowing that an anonymous life awaited him in Goa. But a life where he would put down roots: a life with the three of them.

  They would walk on the beach together, Bikram at his side, with the boy between them. They would each hold one of his small hands. The boy would be up and about again. Unsteady on his feet at first, but they had all the time in the world. The boy would be hesitant about walking into the sea at low tide. They wouldn’t let him go too far. They would stay right beside him: quickly lift him out of the water if he got frightened.

  Sasha could have never imagined himself thinking this way. It was a curious development. As if he’d been a stranger to himself for many years and could finally see what was important in this life. H
e was now happy to trade his fantasy of dominating time and space for the illusion of family happiness.

  He left the key in the ignition and walked on to the plaza. Three fire engines with their sirens blaring raced passed him. Helmeted men with oxygen masks stormed into the hospital lobby. Sasha calmly walked via a side wing of the building towards the inner courtyard.

  21

  The staff lift must have been blocked. Marouan decided he’d better take the stairs. By the third floor he was completely out of breath and his heart was racing, and not only due to his poor condition. Dark-grey smoke from a few floors higher blanketed the stairwell. Panicked people bumped against him. They screamed and pushed each other. Someone fell and someone else stumbled over them.

  On the ICU floor, shadows ran back and forth in the scorching mist. Marouan searched for the special squad men. He bumped into a patient’s bed being pushed towards the blocked lift by two nurses wearing surgical masks. A pointless endeavour.

  Suddenly he saw the policeman lying on the ground in the doorway of the room he’d been guarding. A nurse was bent over him, desperately trying to revive him. Marouan saw where he’d been hit. Double tap to the heart. He entered the boy’s room and saw, to his immense dismay, the damage the other bullets had done.

  22

  The linen draped over the tanks muffled the explosion. But the oxygen fanned the flames in no time. The resulting smoke was so heavy that within minutes the entire ward was enveloped in a bank of thick fog. Total panic ensued. Nurses outscreamed the alarms. Dimitri watched it all with great satisfaction. He was a master of chaos.

  In the corridor he kept the police officer in his sights. When the man left his post in response to cries for help further down, Dimitri quickly slipped into the room and at point-blank range fired two shots at the motionless boy. One to the head and one to the heart. The silencer was hardly necessary, given the infernal din in the corridor.

  When he turned around, he saw the police guard in the doorway. The man shouted something unintelligible and aimed his gun at him with a trembling hand. Quick as a flash, Dimitri shot him twice in the chest. The policeman fell backwards into the thick smoke, as if he was suddenly yanked offstage with a hook. There was loud screaming everywhere.

  Dimitri hurried over to the stairwell. It was pandemonium there too, full of screeching and screaming people pushing and shoving one another, all trying to be the first to make it downstairs. He stuck close to the wall and walked down calmly. Among the people jostling and stumbling over one another he spotted the Arab doctor he’d seen at the ICU front desk earlier, struggling against the flow of traffic in the stairwell.

  Dimitri didn’t put up any resistance and allowed himself to be carried along by the crowd, by the avalanche of panic, which eventually brought him to the main lobby where he darted into a stairwell to the car park.

  Starting the Touareg marked the end of his first mission. Having to suddenly brake for a red Fiat turned out to be the beginning of his second. To his immense surprise, Dimitri recognized the blonde driver who nervously waved to apologize as his next victim.

  23

  When the MICU’s tailgate was unlocked and the two doors swung open, the noisy fire alarm reverberated inside the vehicle. Vera and Ewald quickly wheeled the trolley on to the loading ramp. On the advice of the critical care nurse who introduced herself as Mariska, they took an alternative route via the goods lift. While in transit they discussed the boy’s condition. There had been some problems with his spleen this morning.

  When the lift doors opened they all clasped a hand to their mouth and pushed the trolley into the ICU corridor through the smoke and confusion of the ongoing evacuation. Firefighters with oxygen masks charged on to the unit and ran past them. At the end of the corridor, they saw flames coming out of a storage room. At the word go, one of the firefighters hurled a Fire Knock Out in the room. Firehoses were unrolled. A large ventilator was set up.

  A Moroccan-looking man in a white coat confronted them. ‘Police, follow me.’

  They ended up in a remote corner of the unit where a man with an oxygen mask and a machine gun was waiting for them. ‘It’s okay,’ they heard the detective shout. ‘The boy’s transport!’ Then he turned to Vera and Ewald. ‘We brought him here this morning,’ he said in between gasping breaths. ‘And thank God we did.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Someone just entered his first room and pumped two bullets into a nursing doll.’

  24

  The storm front was now hanging directly above her. Danielle was finally composed enough to realize the weather might impact her departure from Schiphol. She was ready for her next journey. Somehow she’d been leaving her whole life. Always in transit. No one could burn their bridges behind them better than she could. The Netherlands was about to be a distant memory.

  She kept her eyes on the road and thought of what she’d be leaving behind. A life without friends that mainly consisted of work. Her brand new Ikea furniture and second-hand Fiat Punto had offered her little pleasure. Temporary possessions that she hadn’t even had time to get used to.

  She heard the birds screeching. She couldn’t contain her curiosity and answered. The man’s voice at the other end of the line was agitated.

  ‘Danielle Bernson?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘I’m calling you because … I saw you on television and I have information about the boy in the woods.’

  ‘The boy? How did you get my number? ‘

  ‘Via the hospital.’

  ‘What do you know about the boy?’

  ‘I can’t say, not on the phone, that is.’

  ‘Why don’t you call the police?’

  ‘I’ll tell you that too, when I see you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t meet with you.’

  ‘You have to see me. I know what happened.’

  She hesitated.

  ‘You need to call someone else. A journalist. Her name is Farah Hafez. She works for the AND.’

  ‘Do you have her number?’

  ‘No. She should be easy enough to find.’

  25

  Vera deftly manoeuvred the trolley beside the boy’s bed. Together with Ewald she began to disconnect him before hooking him up to the trolley equipment. They switched the ventilator tube and then swapped over the heart-rate and blood-pressure monitor. Tugging at the bottom sheet, they slid the boy on to the trolley.

  The return route was risky. However advanced their equipment might be, in the midst of this pandemonium anything was possible. The fire was under control now, and the immense ventilator in the corridor was steadily dispersing the smoke, but there was still a lot of distress. People were running up and down the corridor. An unexpected emergency stop, or worse, a collision, could cause the boy serious harm. Every single step in this corridor was fraught with risk.

  They’d been joined by a second detective. He and his older colleague cleared the way for the trolley, their hands hovering above their service guns. The man with the machine gun brought up the rear, his eyes darting from left to right.

  In the goods lift Vera learnt what had been arranged. Because of the very real threat of an attack, the boy had been moved in the morning. A stand-in, a nursing doll with brown skin and black hair, was fitted with an oxygen mask and nicely tucked into his bed. Following a recent training course, Vera had some experience with those dolls and knew how lifelike they looked. The police had truly done everything they could to trap the attacker, to the point of deploying snipers disguised as doctors. But the chaos of a fire on the unit had taken them by surprise.

  The young detective said that guarding every single entrance and exit would be pointless. Half the hospital was emptying out. Stopping the flow of fleeing people would claim victims and only increase the panic. The main thing now was to get the boy to safety as quickly as possible.

  When they reached the courtyard and wheeled the boy into the MICU under the watchful eye of the man with the machine gun,
Vera heaved a sigh of relief. She secured the trolley to the anchoring points inside the ambulance as fast as she could. Then the tailgate was closed and soon after they drove out of the yard, towards the car park exit where the detectives would be waiting for them in their car.

  She was concentrating on the boy’s breathing and on the heart-rate monitor when the vehicle suddenly braked and stopped. On the screen she saw a man in black walking towards the MICU. The detectives were nowhere to be seen. Via the intercom she heard the door of the driver’s cab open and slam shut again. A male voice barked orders in English.

  ‘What’s going on, Harold?’ she yelled into the intercom. No response. The MICU accelerated again. ‘Harold? Is everything all right?’

  She took out her mobile phone, keyed in Harold’s number and cursed when she got through to his voicemail. She looked at the screen and saw that they’d turned on to the slip road leading to the ring road, without their police escort. Then she heard the voice of the unknown man over the intercom. He spoke English with a thick Eastern European accent.

  ‘One more phone call and you’ll be scraping your driver’s brain off this partition.’

  As they gathered speed, Vera felt the same fear bubbling up as that time when they got stuck in the lift.

  26

  Constantly checking her rear-view mirror, after the light turned green, Danielle kept close watch of the black Touareg tailing her. He also took the route over the viaduct. At the end, she merged into the left lane. The Touareg followed her like a shadow. Just before the exit, she made a sharp right, hit the gas and drove as hard as she could.