“We can’t leave him,” Shay said.
“Why not? We don’t owe him,” Twist said. “Not more than we owe any of the others.”
“Some of the other people are effectively dead. This guy isn’t,” Shay said. “C’mon, man.”
Twist scratched his nose, sighed, and said, “All right, fine. Get everybody together; we’ll talk it over.”
“We’ve got no time. If they move these people tomorrow…I mean, it’s a six-hour drive.”
“No choice about that,” Twist said. “We’re not flying anywhere. I believe the TSA would snatch us right out of line and call the FBI. Even if we could find a plane, we couldn’t rent a car.”
“I’ll get the guys,” Shay said.
—
They all had still been asleep, except Harmon, who’d run his five miles and was scanning the Internet, and Odin, who was lying on his bed in the same clothes as the day before and looked bad. Shay was aware he hadn’t slept much since Fenfang’s death and that he’d already been sleep-deprived from the nightmares he’d suffered since the waterboarding.
And she thought: Maybe there existed some appropriate therapy he could get someday, but probably not. Odin had experienced too many lousy interactions with caseworkers and therapists in foster care, who could never quite make sense of his high intelligence and his mild autism—and the depression that had set in after their mother’s death. Well, supposed death. She’d been a researcher in an early iteration of Singular and then died in a sudden accident that felt like a cover-up, given all they knew now.
Shay stood in the doorway and told her brother about the phone call, and he simply rose from the bed and said, “We have to go get him.”
In the studio, with all of them gathered around the coffeepot, Cade suggested that it might be a trap—but Shay knew the Chinese man’s voice and believed he was acting alone. Cruz said, “Sometimes you can’t help everybody,” and Emily agreed: “If you get lucky and get him out, you save one person. How many do you risk if it’s a trap? Or even if it’s not a trap but the place is surrounded by Singular people?” She looked around the studio. “What if Singular is listening to us now?”
Odin: “Singular is frantic to deny their involvement with the prisoners, so I doubt they’re there. And if they want us, I’m sure they know where we are. No need to bug us.”
“Could have bugged this place weeks ago,” Danny Dill said. “And Harmon’s friend, the one he talked to, said there’s another level out there….They could be listening.”
Lou said, “Nobody got up here to bug it. I promise you.”
“Could have flown a bug in,” Danny said. “The feds do that to dopers—fly in a little drone, park it in a tree, drop a bug down….”
They all looked at the building windows, and then Twist said: “No way to know. And even I’m not paranoid enough to worry about it.” Twist looked at Harmon. “Do you think we should—could—help this guy?”
Harmon shrugged. “We’d have to check out the hospital. A regular hospital won’t be hard to penetrate, although the last few feet, to get this guy out, might be. If he’s in a locked ward, to get in without sticking a gun in somebody’s back…that could be tricky. But given some time to look the place over, yeah, we could get him out.”
Shay, pacing with impatience, said, “We’ve got to leave right away….”
“We won’t need everybody,” said Harmon. “If Danny and Emily are willing, they’d be best for a recon, since Singular doesn’t know them. Shay, you and I do the actual retrieval, because we’ve worked together. Twist and Cruz drive, safer with a backup car. Odin and Cade stay here, because Singular knows their faces too well and we need them to probe that hospital with their computers, get us everything they can find.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Twist said.
Odin: “I want to go.”
Cade: “So do I.”
Twist: “We need you to stay here. The rest of us can’t do what you can, and we need that stuff.”
Shay: “It’s settled. Out of town in half an hour—grab clothes for overnight, food, whatever. If we move, we can get to San Francisco while it’s still light outside.”
—
Six hours later: Berkeley.
St. Crispin’s Hospital was a white four-story Spanish-style building with what looked like a thousand small square windows. The main entrance was on one side of the building, facing a major street, and the emergency room on the other. They were there at five o’clock, in heavy traffic, cruised the hospital once, their two vehicles linked by walkie-talkies, since they were still nervous about telephones.
Cade and Odin had been busy on the computers while the others drove north. A half hour after they left Hollywood, not yet out of the L.A. metro area, Odin forwarded a hospital map he’d gotten off a website supposedly restricted to doctors. The restriction was not a problem for Odin or Cade, and the maps showed each floor of the hospital, including the locked wards on the third floor.
Cade forwarded a list of rules for visitors—visitation hours were liberal, from six in the morning until ten at night, so getting in would not be a problem.
Odin’s map showed that in addition to the locked wards, there were a number of surgical-recovery units on the third floor.
“We need some names of people who are in those units, or who checked out today, and any information we can get on them,” Twist called back. “They need to be either unconscious or, better, checked out, so we can visit by mistake.”
“We’ll get it,” Cade said.
—
They got names when they were halfway up the Central Valley, with checkout times and conditions, right from the hospital computers. They got brief biographies of the relevant patients as they drove through Oakland, fifteen minutes from the hospital.
“I don’t want to say I’m nervous, but I might need to stop and buy some fresh underwear,” Emily said as they circled the hospital for the third time. She’d be the first one in.
“Ah, you got a great line of BS,” said Harmon. “You’ll do good. Gimme the patient’s name again.”
“Larry Tengle. Eighty-seven. Room 3187. Heart-valve replacement,” Emily said. “Checked out two hours ago, taken to a rehab facility.”
“And inside the door…”
“Is a gift shop that sells flowers. Small bouquet,” Emily said.
“Take your time with the flowers, pick a good one….”
“So I can check out security and cameras.”
Twist was driving. He picked up the walkie-talkie and said, “Putting Emily in.”
Cruz called back: “Gotcha.”
They pulled into a traffic circle at the front of the hospital, dropped Emily, then continued back to the street.
Emily felt as though everyone on the hospital steps were watching her. She knew they weren’t when a man in a suit nearly crashed the revolving door into her face without even realizing it.
Once inside, she paused and looked around. Straight ahead was an information desk, and off to the right, the gift shop. She went that way, checked out the flowers, found a small, cheap bouquet, and lingered for a few minutes at the magazine rack, looking at a Vogue and, over the top of the Vogue, out into the lobby.
There were cameras, four of them that she could see. She paid for the flowers and the magazine, went to the information desk to ask for directions to room 3187, was sent down a wide hallway to a bank of elevators, and took the first one to the third floor.
The hall the elevators opened onto led to a wide lobby dominated by a circular desk, where two nurses were working on computers. More nurses buzzed around the desk like bees around a hive. Four corridors radiated out from the desk.
From the maps sent out by Cade and Odin, Emily thought Larry Tengle’s room was down a corridor to the left, while the locked ward was down a corridor straight ahead. Trying to look as though she knew where she was going, she rounded the desk and headed straight, past a patient pushing a wheeled IV stand.
No
body stopped her; nobody even paid attention to her. Their lack of attention was almost insulting, like they were waiters in a snooty restaurant.
The doors to the patients’ rooms were open, and Emily saw an assortment of people, almost all of them gray- or white-haired, sitting in beds, a few of them asleep, most of them talking with visitors or watching televisions she couldn’t see.
At the end of the hallway was another closed door. She was about to open it when a man came through. He was wearing a gray suit and tie and carried a leather portfolio. He glanced at her, stopped, and asked, “Can I help you?”
She asked, “Are there more rooms through there? I can’t find Mr. Tengle.” As the door swung slowly shut behind the man, she saw a short hallway beyond him, blocked by another door with a sign that said SECURE AREA, and a keypad on the wall.
“No, that’s a ward. What room are you looking for?” He was friendly enough, unsuspicious.
“Uh, 3187.”
“Made the wrong turn,” the man said. “Go back to the desk and take a right.”
“Thank you.” She gave him a shy smile and walked along with him for a few feet, then asked, “Are you a doctor?”
“Yup. I am.”
“Like, a surgeon?”
“Radiologist.”
“Oh. I know about those,” Emily said. She turned the cuteness up to eleven. “A radiologist told Mr. Tengle that he needed a new valve in his heart.”
“Yup. That’s us,” the man said.
“So you spend all day looking at hearts?”
“I spent this morning looking at brains,” the man said. “But I’ll probably get some hearts and spines this afternoon. Maybe some guts.”
“I’d love to be a radiologist, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Emily said.
“You in college?”
Emily almost forgot she was on a secret mission and replied candidly, “I wish. Right now, I’m working in sales, trying to save some money to go to college, probably in-state. Otherwise, tuition is, like, the price of a Ferrari.”
“Well, sounds like a plan,” the man said, and then, “You’re right about the tuition. I’ve still got loans up to my knees.” And, “Hope you find Mr. Tengle.” He sped up and disappeared down the hallway.
Emily ducked into a room where an elderly man was asleep, his head tipped back on a pillow. A plastic tube snaked up to his nose, feeding in oxygen. After getting her courage up, she took out her cell phone, brought the camera up, then walked confidently back to the door at the end of the hall, pulled it open, stepped up to the keypad, took a photo of it, and then another, as Harmon had told her to.
She tried the door handle to the secure area, but it was locked.
A few seconds later, back outside the first door, she walked along the hallway toward the elevators and sent the two photos to Harmon. As she rounded the nursing desk, she put in a call to Twist: “I spotted the door, but it’s tough. A very long hallway, and you’ve got to go by a nursing desk with lots of people. I don’t think you could get back out past them. Better send in Danny from the back.”
“Doing that,” said Twist.
On the first floor, a bald man was waiting for an elevator, a worried look on his sunburned face. He was dressed in a reflective safety vest and heavy boots. Emily held the bouquet out to him and said, “I don’t need these flowers, as it turns out. You want them?”
“Oh, wow. Thanks,” he said.
He seemed really pleased, and that gave her an extra lift as she went back out into the sunshine and started breathing again. She’d done her part, and hadn’t messed up.
—
With Danny in the backseat, Twist drove to the emergency entrance at the rear of the hospital.
Harmon was examining the photos from Emily. “I’m looking at the wear on the numbers. They don’t change codes very often in hospitals, and sometimes not at all, because too many people need to know them and they don’t want people stopped by a wrong code in an emergency. They’ll almost certainly have the same code on all the doors, for the same reason.”
Danny was looking over his shoulder at Emily’s photos, and the wear on the keypad buttons was obvious. “So…two-five-six-nine?”
“Looks like it. Or some combination of those numbers. There are twenty-four possibilities….”
He wrote them all on a slip of paper and passed it to Danny. “Start at the first one, and let them roll. Shouldn’t take you more than a couple of minutes, even if it’s the twenty-fourth one.”
Danny smoothed down his reddish brown dreadlocks and straightened his gold-rimmed round glasses. He was twenty-six and wearing a T-shirt that said PLAY NICE.
“How do I look?”
Harmon checked him out. “Like you OD’d last night and want to go home.”
Twist: “Perfect.”
—
Another long-haired man was standing outside the emergency room entrance. As Danny walked up, the man said, “You got a match or a gun?”
“Uh…why would you need a gun, chief?”
The man held up an unlit cigarette. “ ’Cause if I don’t get a match, I’m gonna kill myself.”
Danny dug in his pocket, pulled out a Bic lighter, fired up the man’s cigarette.
“Saved my life, duder.”
—
Danny went on through the doors. Inside, two dozen or so people were scattered around a waiting room. A male nurse behind a desk asked, “You checking in or checking somebody out?”
“Got a friend I’m waiting on,” Danny said. Pointing down a hallway, he asked, “Can I get to the cafeteria that way?”
“Yep, you got it. Stay away from the green Jell-O.”
Danny went that way, down the hall, past a lot of unmarked doors, to an elevator that said FREIGHT ONLY.
He pushed the button, waited, rode the elevator up to the second floor, then walked back in the direction from which he’d come on the floor below. On the first floor, the stairwell door was unmarked, but here it had an exit sign above it, and he went through the door onto a narrow landing. He took the steps up and, on the third floor, found himself behind the secure area’s back exit.
The keypad showed hardly any wear; he began running the numbers on Harmon’s list, hit it on the fourteenth try. He heard the lock click, turned the door handle, pulled the door open an inch, pushed it shut.
He took his phone out and sent the combination 6-2-5-9 to Harmon. Once he had the code, he was supposed to head back out, but he decided to press his luck a bit further.
He punched the code in again, opened the door enough to peek through. He could see beds with patients, and the patients he could see were Asian. Other beds were concealed by privacy curtains. He could see no nurses or hospital personnel at all.
He slipped inside the ward. He could see seven patients; two reacted to his presence, following him with their eyes, and the other five were either asleep or staring blankly ahead. At the end of each bed was an electronic slate with a name in large letters: CHONG, UNKNOWN #3, PARK, KIM, SUK, UNKNOWN #4, another KIM.
He walked back down the line of beds, now checking those concealed by curtains. The third one he checked was occupied by a thin man with the same bronze knobs on his head that Fenfang had had. The electronic pad said UNKNOWN #8.
“Eight?” he whispered. “We’re the people you called.”
Eight whispered back: “Get me free.”
Eight was dressed in a hospital smock. He wouldn’t be walking out like that. Danny whispered, “We’ll have to get you some clothes….”
Eight said, “My foot. My foot is chained.”
Danny looked: Eight was shackled to the bed with a leather restraint with a locking nut in the middle, and when Danny twisted it, he could feel a steel cable inside the leather.
“We’ll bring cutters. When is the best time?”
Before Eight could answer, the door at the far end rattled, and they heard somebody step inside. Eight whispered, “Under the bed.”
&nbs
p; Danny crouched and looked under the bed: there was some motorized equipment beneath it, but enough space to hide him. He slid under, then scrunched as close to the back wall as he could get.
A moment later, a man a ways down the row of beds said, “Ask him if he has pain now.”
There was a burst of an unfamiliar language—Korean, Danny thought—then a translated reply. “No, not now.”
More Korean, and then English from the translator: “He wants to know what will happen to him.”
“The authorities are discussing that.”
More Korean.
“He wants to stay here. He says if he goes to Korea—he means North Korea—they will kill him.”
“That’s not my job to decide,” said the English speaker. They apparently moved on, and the English speaker said, “Ask him about the pain….”
Danny could see, just below the curtains, feet coming down the ward as the doctor or nurse checked each patient capable of speaking and the translator relayed the patients’ answers. At Eight’s bed, the curtain was pulled back, and the translator said, “This one says he is Chinese and he doesn’t speak Korean. I can understand that he is not in pain, but you should get a Chinese translator here.”
“Okay. Next.” The curtain was closed again.
The pair continued down the ward, and after finishing with the last patient, the English speaker said, “Dinner in half an hour.”
The Korean translator said something loudly enough to carry across the full ward, apparently telling those who could understand him that dinner was on the way. The door at the end of the ward rattled again, and the two were gone.
Danny slipped out from under the bed and said, “Gotta go,” to Eight, who said, “You come back after twenty-two hundred.”
“We’ll be back for you.”
A few seconds later, Danny was starting down the stairs.
As he did, he heard the stairwell door on the bottom floor open. He looked over the railing and saw what looked like a cop’s hat. Danny didn’t want to deal with that, so he went through the door on the second floor.
A young woman was walking toward him, pushing a canvas bin full of dirty scrubs, and Danny said, “I’m lost. How do I get to the lobby?”
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